I seemed to be having a bit of a Java on the desktop day yesterday because the second talk I went to was about Swing again. This time is was how to build cool looking JFC apps. I've done a fair amount of Swing programming in the past and one of the things that I always find hardest as a developer is to get desktop clients looking good. The first part of this session was based around some of the less well-known features of Swing such as graduated fills, the glass pane and so on. There were some excellent code tips given and I'm surprised at how easy some of them are to implement. Also, I was surprised at how much difference they can make.

The second part of the session looked at the JGoodies library and this is something that I've not really investigated before. There is some amazing stuff in there making it even easier to include stuff like animations in your Swing apps. In addition to looking at JGoodies, there were some really useful UI design tips. All in all, this is probably one of the best sessions I attended this week.

As an aside, I still think that there's a need for some sort of library to abstract out the platform specific layout characteristics (button size, spacing, etc) because you still need to do this to make your app look truely native. Does anybody know if this exists currently?

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Posted by Simon Brown on 01 July 2004 19:58:47 BST #