Real life Java Swing Project

Question

Hi everybody!

I've been working with swing for the last 2 years, but i'm still not satisfy with my own work. The apps are "fast" enough, but the development isn't enough "clean".

Can you recommend me any real world project, book, or something similar that shows me how a real world swing app work. May be a framework, something structured, etc.

For example, i'm thinking i may code a "window manager" that has all the window of the app in an unified resource, may be cached, etc. I think all those good ideas must be implemented already.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Take a look at the source of the swing application framework.

Answer 2

I'd recommend you to have a look at the NetBeans Rich client platform or the IntelliJ IDEA source code - those are two of the most prominent open source Swing applications in existence.

Answer 3

You may want to take a look at GUTS-GUI, a Swing Application Framework, based on Guice Dependency Injection library.

Its concepts are mostly the same as the "Swing Application Framework" (also known as JSR-296), but its design is much cleaner (and more easily extensible) and better adapted to dependency injection (which is extremely hard to achieve with SAF).

GUTS-GUI comes with a simple example application (not a real-life one yet, sorry).

GUTS-GUI also includes an "Event Bus" which is generally considered a good way to communicate (in a decoupled manner for easier maintainability) between components of a GUI application.

Please note that GUTS-GUI is still in development stage current stage, but well advanced already in terms of Swing design, best practices for GUI development...