Abstract
Does your application look and feel really matter?
Sun introduced the Swing toolkit with JDK 1.2, providing the developer with new graphical components to build applications. Swing differs from the old AWT by delegating the painting and behaviors of the components to Java code instead of using the platform native component peers - Swing look and feel was born.
The presentation goes through an overview of Swing look and feel architecture, a discussion around the topic "do I need a custom look and feel?", a look at the available look and feel implementations, a closer look at the Skin Look And Feel, an introduction to the Synth Look And Feel and finally tips if you plan to write custom components.
Audience
all
Speaker(s)
Frédéric Lavigne is working with Java technology since july 1996 creating his first applet, a Mandelbrot viewer. Following projects included a file manager for the Java platform, an installer maker (kind of InstallShield), some missing AWT components, a Swing based database GUI, etc...
In 1998 Frédéric made a jump to Sunnyvale where he worked for Intuitive Systems on the Java profiler Optimize It.
Today, Frédéric is working for a french company as a project manager where he actively works on Java technology. His area of expertise spans client- and server-side java, and distributed object computing.
In 2000, Frédéric created the (Swing) Skin Look And Feel and started javootoo.com, the repository of Swing lookandfeels, and recently the L2FProd.com Common Components project came live providing the developer community with missing Swing components.
Related Links
Slides
Skin Look and Feel presentation 
