 | Level: Intermediate Michael Galpin (mike.sr@gmail.com), Developer
03 Apr 2007 Jigloo is an Eclipse plug-in that enables you to build sophisticated graphical user interfaces (GUIs) rapidly that run on the Java™ platform. It can be used to build Swing-based applications and Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT)-based applications. It is an easy-to-use visual editor, so you can create the UI for your desktop application quickly. In this tutorial, we build a simple workflow application and use Jigloo to create its UI. Learn how easy it is to get started with Jigloo and to tap into its advanced features, such as visual inheritance. Finally, we test an application and package it for others to use.
In this tutorial
Java is a great platform for building rich desktop applications. When Java debuted in 1995, it shipped with the Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT). This was Java's first UI library for building desktop applications. The release of JDK 1.2 in 1998 included Swing, a much-improved toolkit. Since then, there have been many improvements to Swing. It is now a powerful UI library that performs well on many different platforms. SWT is a competing UI toolkit for Java that offers many advantages. Now with Jigloo, you can rapidly build UIs targeting Swing or SWT. You can even build SWT applications that include Swing components, but that's beyond the scope of this tutorial. In this tutorial, you'll learn about Jigloo by building a simple workflow application. You will use Jigloo, which is an Eclipse plug-in, to create the UI for the application. You will then build and test your application and package it for others to use.
Prerequisites
Familiarity with UI programming concepts like event handlers and data binding is helpful, but not absolutely necessary. Exposure to AWT/Swing or SWT is also helpful, but not a requirement.
System requirements
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Eclipse V3.2
- Since Jigloo is a plug-in for Eclipse, you need Eclipse, of course. The application will use SWT, and Eclipse also includes the SWT libraries you'll need for that.
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Jigloo
- Jigloo is a plug-in for Eclipse. In the tutorial, you will see how to install Jigloo directly from Eclipse using Eclipse's powerful update manager.
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Java 5+
- The application in this tutorial makes use of some Java 5 features, such as Annotations and Generics. Download Java 5 or Java 6.
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JAXB V2.0
- The application in this tutorial uses XML as a data store and uses JAXB for parsing and serializing XML. If you're using Java 6, JAXB is included and there's nothing to do. If you're using Java 5, you'll need Sun's JAXB 2.0 Reference Implementation (RI).
Formats html, pdf
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