Eight Tips for Swing Development

Java's Swing GUI toolkit is one of the most powerful and flexible frameworks available for creating professional, high-quality desktop applications. Along with its considerable abilities, however, comes considerable complexity. Swing does not have a reputation for ease of use (despite being much easier than many of its competitors–but that's another story). If you could combine the Swings power with the productivity of easier, more restrictive tools, such as Microsoft's Visual Basic - you'd have an incredible tool for application development.

This presentation talks about eight techniques you can employ to realize such an environment, such as how you can successfully integrate GUI builders and XUL frameworks into your project, making it much easier to set and retrieve values on Swing components, how to make it trivial to make JTables easy to use, and more.

Along with the presentation and slides, attendees will be able to download open source code they can use in their projects today to implement these ideas.

About Ben Galbraith

Ben Galbraith is a frequent technical speaker, occasional consultant, and author of several Java-related books. He is a co-founder of Ajaxian.com, an experienced CTO and Java Architect, and is presently a consultant specializing in Java Swing and Ajax development. Ben wrote his first computer program when he was six years old, started his first business at ten, and entered the IT workforce just after turning twelve. For the past few years, he’s been professionally coding in Java. Ben has delivered hundreds of technical presentations world-wide at venues including JavaOne, The Ajax Experience, JavaPolis, and the No Fluff Just Stuff Java Symposium series; he was the top-rated speaker at JavaOne 2006.

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