February 15th, 2000

At about the time the beta version 1.3 of Java2 Standard Edition was released, we published a summary of the planned 1.3 changes for Swing on The Swing Connection. The currently available version of 1.3 is called "RC", which stands for release candidate; this means that it's very close to the final release. Our list of Swing changes for this version is the same as for the beta version; however, we've reorganinzed and reformatted it a little.

If you're planning on migrating your software to 1.3 and you haven't reviewed the Swing changes yet, we encourage you to do so now. There are some new additions to the API, such as support for input verification and new infrastructure for creating keyboard bindings. And if your application uses internal frames, be sure check the default visibility change at the beginning of the internal frames section.

Click here to see the full list.

February 11th, 2000

What you've all been waiting for!

If you went to JavaOne '99, you may have heard the Swing team talk about a new persistence model that would allow Swing user interfaces to be "serialized" as XML documents. We've implemented the proposed model, and here's your chance to look at it.

The recent surge of interest in Swing IDE's has brought the question of interoperability to the fore. At the heart of this issue is the question of persistence and how a design can be saved in a format which is not tied to the tool that created it.

We've created a prototype that demonstrates how one might implement the new model and a Java Specification Request (JSR) has been submitted to the Java Community Process.

Learn more about the design of the persistence model, download full source code for our prototype, and play with an example builder that uses the persistence model to save GUIs as XML documents. Then give us your feedback.

Click here for the full report.

January 21st, 2000

This brief article is an update to the article Generating Event Listeners Dynamically. Since that article was written, a new Dynamic Proxy API has been introduced in Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) version 1.3. The new API makes it easy to create event listener classes dynamically. In the original article this was done with a special purpose runtime compiler.

Click here for the full article.

January 4th, 2000   

When an application requires support for displaying a stack of panels with only one panel visible at a time, a JTabbedPane is often used. However, JTabbedPane in unsuitable from a UI perspective when the number of panels varies dynamically.

The traditional alternative is to use an AWT CardLayout, but we've found that it can be awkward to use, and can cause some performance problems when used with Swing.

This article describes a component called CardPanel that we wrote to address these problems.

Click here for the full article.