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JDNC simplifies Java UI development

Open source API adds components, aids data-centric development

Jack Li Guojie (jackliguojie@hotmail.com), Java developer

Jack Li Guojie is an independent Java developer who has been building various types of Java applications since 1998. His areas of interest and experience include artificial intelligence, user interfacing, Web applications, and enterprise system architecture. He has contributed articles to many leading software journals. He is the author of the book Professional Java Native Interfaces with SWT/JFace (2005, Wrox).

Summary: JDNC is an open source project that aims to make Java™ UI development easier. It offers a number of prebuilt components that provide functionality that many developers have to laboriously add to their Swing widgets. But perhaps more interestingly, it also provides data binding features that might change the way you link your data to your interfaces. In this hands-on tutorial, Java UI developer Jack Li Guojie guides you through using JDNC Swing Extensions to improve your Java UI without changing much of your existing code. You'll also see how to simplify your data-centric Java UI development by taking advantage of JDNC data binding and the DataSet API.

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Date: 27 Sep 2005
Level: Intermediate
PDF: A4 and Letter (1138 KB | 56 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

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Before you start

About this tutorial

This tutorial shows you how to simplify your Java user interface development with the Java Desktop Network Components (JDNC) API. JDNC is an open source Java UI framework that aims to simplify Swing-based desktop application development. It can significantly reduce the effort and expertise required to build rich and data-centric Java desktop applications. Built on a layered architecture, JDNC offers three main components: Swing Extensions, JDNC Components, and the JDNC Markup Language.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to use JDNC Swing Extensions to improve your Java user interface without changing much of your existing code. You'll also see how to simplify your data-centric Java UI development by taking advantage of JDNC data binding and the DataSet API.

This tutorial is written for Java developers who have at least a basic knowledge of the Swing UI framework.

Prerequisites

To run the examples or sample code in this tutorial, you'll need to download and install JDNC. Visit the project's home page at dev.java.net to download the latest version of JDNC. (Note: Java 5.0 is required to run JDNC). If you want to run the demos in The DataSet API section, you'll also need to download Apache Derby.

To set up the demos in this tutorial, download the jdnc-source.zip from the Download section of this tutorial. Unzip this archive to a folder named JDNC_TUTORIAL_HOME. If you are using Eclipse as your IDE, you can simply import it as a project. JDNC_TUTORIAL_HOME/src contains all the source files.

The zip file contains the full source code for this tutorial. To keep things concise, the listings in this tutorial present only the code relevant for our discussion. You can look at the zip file in the Download section if you want to see the complete listings of the classes we'll examine here.

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