SwingxtrasBuilder: yet another Groovy builder for Swing? yup, here are a couple of reasons why:

• There are few Swing based projects out there that provide high quality components but either they are not packaged in suite or their suite is too small to warrant a builder of their own.
• Packaging those components in a builder facilitates mixin&matchin'em with Griffon's CompositeBuilder.
• A builder is also a thin layer of abstraction, it will take care of some of Swing's pain points for you.

So what is included in the first cut you ask?

• xswingx - provides prompt support, text "buddies" and a search field.
• BalloonTip - provides balloon tips for use in Java Swing applications.
• l2fProd.commons - provides the developer community with these missing components, components inspired (copied?!) from modern user interfaces.

Here are some examples running on SwingPad. The first one shows l2fprod.common's PropertySheetPanel in action.



A particular instance of Person has been bound to the PropertySheetPanel. Notice that the panel only displays the properties that were nested in it, by default the panel will inspect all properties (this includes, class, metaClass and in the case of an observable bean propertyChangeListeners), this scenario shows one of the options provided by the builder that will let you filter out which properties should be displayed. A PropertyChangeListener was registered to a textarea to show that the updated values were actually pushed to the bound bean. Here is another example that shows MigLayout + BalloonTip + xswingx



The MigLayout example was taken from this link. You can appreciate that both the textField and the passwordField have prompt support applied to them, if you hover on the Cancel button a balloonTip will appear (the hideAfter: property is set to 1 minute so that the snapshot could be taken).

SwingxtrasBuilder is jdk5 compatible and Griffon compatible of course! The builder page will be available shortly, a Griffon plugin can not be that far behind

Keep on Groovying!