Making Swing Apps Pretty with Groovy

Groovy's usefulness in Java development keeps going up and up, and with Swing that is no exception. While Swing apps before have been considered boring, ugly and hard to maintain … much of that can be changed with Groovy. Applying Groovy, SwingXBuilder, and JGoodies we will show how to make old swing apps not only look prettier but be more easy to maintain and actually provide more functionality for.

Most that have used Swing have a love - hate, and some even have a hate - hate relationship with it. Swing development can be tedious and worse ugly. In this presentation we will show how to make creating applications with Swing easier than before. Groovy, with it's closures, make's it a perfect platform for writing embedded applications like Swing. With it tools like SwingBuilder and SwingXBuilder have come out to make this process easier by providing support for normal Swing operations via closures.

We will step through creating a few Swing applications with Groovy, and show the options available to make your Swing applications prettier with Groovy.

About Joseph Nusairat

Joseph Faisal Nusairat, author of “Beginning JBoss Seam” and co-author “Beginning Groovy & Grails”, is a Java developer who has been working full time in the Columbus Ohio area since 1998, primarily focused on Java development. His career has taken him into a variety of Fortune 500 industries including military applications, data centers, banking, internet security, pharmaceuticals, and insurance. Joseph is particularly fond of open source projects and tries to use as much open source software as possible when working with clients. Joseph is a graduate of Ohio University with dual degrees in Computer Science and Microbiology with a minor in Chemistry. Currently, Joseph works as a Senior Partner at Integrallis Software (www.integrallis.com).

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