At the recent JavaOneSM Conference, the JavaTM Foundation Classes (JFC) and Swing Technology API team from Sun presented two technical sessions that showed developers how to build several striking client applications using the JavaTM 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SETM). Thomas Ulrich reported on the technical sessions.

"Rich JavaTM Technology-Based Clients for Web Services, The Sequel" continued last year's session, which showed how easily developers can create a compelling client for the iPlanetTM Calendar Server. This year, Sun's Hans Muller, Leif Samuelsson and Igor Kushnirskiy unveiled three clients: a new version of the calendar desktop client, a client for a large PDA (the Compaq iPAQ) and a small Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) client that runs on a mobile phone.

During a related session, "How to Build an Awesome Swing Client," Sun's Norbert Lindenberg, Josh Outwater and Scott Violet led developers on a tour of an end-to-end application that showed how several designers can collaborate to arrange furniture in a room. This application demonstrated all of the J2SE platform client features: user interface, 2-D graphics, accessibility and internationalization.

Calendar

The three rich calendar clients from the sequel to last year's session demonstrated a live connection to the iPlanet Calendar Server. "These clients really show the breadth of JavaTM technology support for clients," said Kushnirskiy. "The desktop calendar client makes heavy use of Swing's configurability to give the entire application a highly custom look."

Developers created most of the effects contained in the screenshots without new classes or a custom look and feel. They configured standard Swing components with backgrounds, borders and other properties.

Furniture

Violet, Lindenberg and Outwater created yet another example of a rich client for a Web Service. Arranging furniture has never been easier. The Web Service provides shared data about the location of the furniture and the chat stream, visualization, communication and authoring of the client.

The application demonstrates several techniques that any Swing application can deploy: graphics, visually compelling user interfaces and internationalization.

Each designer shares a complete view of the evolving design from a local perspective. "Localization goes far beyond just substituting strings," Outwater explains. "Designer dates, currency, distances, even visual objects like the ruler have been localized. The cost of each furniture item is always displayed in the locale of the user who's actually going to take delivery."

This application relies on Java 2DTM APIs. Each visual design element is defined by the Java 2D API Shape interface that keeps track of the scale/rotate/zoom transformation for each element and handles selection and other bookkeeping. The GUI also relies on Java 2D APIs for anti-aliasing and compositing. "Shapes and text look great at all scales because they're rendered with anti-aliasing turned on," said Outwater. "Pop-up panels, like the tool palette, fade in and out because a little timer loop sets the composite property of the graphics used to paint the panel."

For additional technical details and illustrations:

http://java.sun.com/features/2002/03/whatdev.html [...read more...]

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