Summary
Swing has seen a burst of activity and development in recent years. SwingLabs is a Java community project that aims to create a layer of widgets and components above those already in the J2SE API. The latest SwingLabs tool is a Wizard API that lets you build setup and configuration wizards for a Swing application.
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While much developer attention has focused lately on AJAX, Swing and SWT have both seen a resurgence of activity. A goal of those efforts is to make those toolkits easier to use, and hence to further adoption.
The SwingLabs project on Java.net has come up with a series of nifty widgets and APIs, such as a spruced-up JTable that's easy to sort, a task pane that has a nice 3D shaded border, a data binding framework, and now a Wizard API. Here's a snippet from an article that describes the Wizard API:
The Wizard project is a subproject of SwingLabs, which allows experimentation with extensions to existing Swing components as well as completely new ones. These new or enhanced components might be included in future versions of the JDK.
Wizard is a class library that aims to provide a simple API for writing wizards. Its goal is to offer an easy-to-use solution that enables any Swing application to provide wizards with minimal code and effort.
Will these efforts succeed in encouraging the creation of more Swing apps?
Speaking of AJAX, I've been working on a pet project for the past 2years to bring mozilla XUL technology to java. It basically renders mozilla XUL in swing. Check it out at http://sulu.sourceforge.net
> The <a > href="https://swinglabs.dev.java.net/">SwingLabs</a> > project on Java.net has come up with a series of nifty > widgets and APIs, such as a spruced-up JTable that's easy > to sort, a task pane that has a nice 3D shaded border, a > data binding framework, and now a Wizard API.
So many people have already developed wizard APIs, I fear that there won't be much buy-in immediately. I created a wizard api in my swingutil.dev.java.net project. I'm not sure how many use it though. I did it for one project that I've been working on recently, and so I stuck it into that project because that's what it's for.
Haven't heard anything from swinglabs folks either. You'd think they'd be looking for people that had stuff already out there to try and find a new common ground.
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