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:: 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 ::

Example 1   Example 2   Example 3

:: 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.

(c) 2003 JGoodies