Abstract

The past year has brought a resurgence of Java on the desktop. With J2SE 1.5, Swing now delivers as a strong, mature toolkit to build on for desktop application developers. Today's Swing applications are better looking, better performing, and easier to deploy than ever before. With a strong base in place, focus is now turning towards ways to improve developer productivity. Developers seek effective desktop application architectures atop Swing's base APIs that allow them to focus on creating business applications in a consistent, scalable, and best-practice fashion.

This session introduces the Spring Rich Client Project (Spring Rich), a sub project of the Spring Framework, and its lightweight container architecture, focusing on its powerful Dependency Injection capabilities, as a state-of-the-art desktop application framework. It will highlight Spring Rich's capabilities-in particular, its integration with core Spring for application configuration, layering, and dependency management. It will also cover the design strategies behind Spring Rich's solutions to common desktop application problems, in areas such as "as you type" control data binding and validation, centralized GUI commands (actions), form/component construction and layout, and important application window, view, editor, dialog, and wizard abstractions.

The session will showcase the value-add of using a lightweight container within a J2SE environment, contrasting it with traditional programming models. It will also discuss how Spring Rich integrates with a number of established projects in the desktop Java space, including JDNC, JGoodies, Glazed Lists, InfoNode, and JIDE Docking.

Attendees will learn the benefits of using a lightweight, test-driven approach to building Swing applications. They will be presented the key issues facing developers of non-trivial desktop apps, and how Spring Rich addresses them. Attendees will leave with a clear grasp on how to best leverage Swing in a productive fashion.

Audience

all

Speaker(s)

Peter De Bruycker, a core Spring Rich developer, is java developer with 4 years of experience in developing software, including all aspects of the software development lifecycle.

Peter started his career as a developer with Software Point, a software company developing accounting and order processing software for transport and textile companies.

His rol was split between one part hands on architecture, design, and coding, another part mentoring and teaching best practices at the code and process level. Throughout this period, Peter gained experience with and an appreciation for agile development practices as a vital part of software success. In this period, he developed a Swing application framework, to be used as the base for all applications.

Since october 2004, Peter works as a consultant for AC Partners, mainly working for the banking and insurance industry.

Peter has been a Spring Rich developer since august 2004.

Related Links

Spring Rich Client Project

Slides

SpringRCP presentation