A typical Java developer knows that when you need to develop a GUI for a Java
application, Swing is the tool. Eclipse SWT also has a number of followers,
but the majority of people use Java Swing. For the past 10 years, it was a
given that Swing development wouldn't be easy; you have to master working
with the event-dispatch thread, GridBaglayout, and the like. Recently, the
NetBeans team created a nice GUI designer called Matisse, which was also
ported to MyEclipse. Prior to Matisse, JBuilder had the best Swing designer,
but it was too expensive. Now a good designer comes with NetBeans for free.
Why even consider Flex for developing Rich Internet Applications (RIA)?
First, we'll give the short answer. Just look at the code in Listing 1. This
code compiles and runs in th... (more)
The publicity that AJAX grabbed over the last half a year is based on closing
the gap between the Web applications and the desktop applications, combining
the "reach" and "rich." At the same time, the gap between the technological
level of AJAX and what corporate developers expect in their modern arsenal is
really astonishing. After all, AJAX is neither a tool nor a platform. There
is no... (more)
In this excerpt from our book, Rich Internet Applications, we'll cover how to
set up large applications intended for Web or, more broadly speaking,
distributed deployment. As an example let's consider an enterprise
application that consists of hundreds of screens, reports, forms, and
dashboards. Accordingly, about a dozen engineers specializing in GUIs,
frameworks, data layers, and busin... (more)
In any GUI tool, one of the most popular components is the one that shows
data in a table format like JTable in Java or Datawindow in PowerBuilder. The
Adobe Flex 2 version of such a component is called DataGrid. In any UI
framework, the robustness of such a component depends on formatting and
validating utilities as well as a whole suite of data input controls:
CheckBoxes, ComboBoxes, R... (more)
From Farata Systems blog
Closures play a cornerstone role for dynamic languages. They are essential
for implementing features like OO or building frameworks. At the same time, a
formal definition of closures does not really help to understand them. Let us
go through few examples. First, we’ll show what closures look like, and
then we’ll give you their use patterns.
It all sta... (more)