:: JGoodies Forms ::Build better screens faster
The JGoodies Forms framework helps you lay out and implement
elegant Swing panels quickly and consistently. It makes simple
things easy and the hard stuff possible, the good design easy and
the bad difficult.
:: Download the
whitepaper (pdf) :: Test
Drive the Forms Demo :: Download the
Forms :: Learn
how to make your applications look better
:: Main Benefits ::
- Powerful, flexible and precise layout
- Easy to work with and quite easy to learn
- Faster UI production
- Better UI code readability
- Leads to better style guide compliance
:: Screenshots ::
:: Features ::The FormLayout has been designed to
be powerful, flexible, precise and easy to learn and understand. It
can significantly reduce the time to describe a form and to fill it
with components. The layout manager introduces a unique layout
feature: it honors the screen resolution and dialog font size to
retain the layout proportions in different environments.
Also, we have seperated the layout task from the panel
construction. Therefore we provide a set of non-visual builders that
assist you in defining common panel layouts and in filling a form
with components. The JGoodies Forms ships with general purpose
builders and builders for specialized layout tasks. For example, the
DefaultFormBuilder helps you build forms with one, two,
three, or four columns. The ButtonBarBuilder specializes in
building button bars.
On top of these non-visual builders the JGoodies Forms provides
factories that create the most frequently used layouts, panels, bars
and stacks. We recommend to use the factory methods whenever
possible; future releases may map a logical panel creation to a
concrete creation method that honors the platform and look&feel,
for example the Mac vs. Windows button bar layout, where Mac has the
default button in the right hand side and Windows in the left.
:: Proof of Concept ::The Forms framework ensures the
visual quality and consistency of our freeware tools and
demos - see yourself.
:: Acknowledgements ::The form-oriented building has been
inspired by the grid layout system as described by Kevin Mullet and
Darrel Sano in their book Designing Visual Interfaces. The
FormLayout’s API has roots in the APIs of TableLayout by Daniel
Barbalace, HIGLayout by Daniel Michalik and GridBagLayout by Doug
Stein. The concept of dialog units has been taken from Microsoft
user interface implementations.
The finished library you can now download for free has been
financed by sponsors of my Java desktop activities and customers of
my products. It is only with their money that I could open source
and provide it at no charge.
Many thanks to all these customers and sponsors, especially
Johannes Riege and the Java desktop team at Sun Microsystems.
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