Question

Is there a resource where GUI design for swing is explained? Like best practices and such.

Answer 1

Design guidelines aren’t exactly followed much anymore because Swing works on so many different platforms. Sun wrote up some a long time ago, and never changed them so I’d say read it if you think it will help. Here is some practical knowledge about doing swing development.

• Never use GridBagLayout. Grab TableLayout. It radically simplifies layout for you Swing UI. GridBagLayout is the devil.
• Don’t over embed components just to get a layout right (i.e. embedded BoxLayout, etc). See point 1 for how to do this. There are performance issues having components on the screen.
• Separate your program along MVC lines. Swing has View and Model separation, but in large programs the View (i.e. what subclasses a Swing Component) turns into a psuedo View/Controller only making things complicated to reuse and maintain. It turns into spaghetti code fast. Break the habit and create a Controller class that DOES NOT extend Swing. Same goes for the Model (no swing). Controller instantiates high level view classes, and wires itself as a listener to views.
• Simplify popup dialogs using simple panels only. Don’t subclass JDialog. Create a reusable dialog class that wraps a panel that can be used something like JOptionPane. Your panels will not be tied to dialogs only and can be reused. It’s very easy when you work this way.
• Avoid actionlistener/command. This is old junk and not very reusable. Use AbstractAction (anon classes are your choice I don’t have a problem with them). AbstractAction encapsulates text, icon, mneumonics, accelerators, reusable in buttons, popups, menus, handles toggling enabled/disabled states, can be shared among multiple components, it also is the basis for InputMap/ActionMaps for mapping keyboard strokes to actions. ActionMaps give you loads of power for reuse.
• It’s best to have to view dispatch events to the controller. I’m not talking about mouse/keyboard junk, but high level events. Like NewUserEvent, AddUserEvent, DeleteUserEvent, etc. Have your controller listen for these high-level business events. This will promote encapsulation by keeping the concerns of the view (should I use a table, list, tree, or something else?) separated from the flow of the application. The controller doesn’t care if the user clicked a button, menu, or checkbox.
• Events are not just for the Controller. Swing is event programming. Your model will be doing things off the SwingThread or in the background. Dispatching events back to the controller is a very easy way to have it respond to things going on in the model layer that might be using threads to do work.
• Understand Swing’s Threading rules! You’d be surprised how few people actually understand that Swing is single threaded and what that means for multi-threaded applications.
• Understand what SwingUtilities.invokeLater() does.
• Never* ever use SwingUtilities.invokeAndWait(). You’re doing it wrong. Don’t try and write synchronous code in event programming. (* There are some corner cases where invokeAndWait() is acceptable, but 99% of the time you don’t need invokeAndWait() ).
• If you’re starting a fresh project from scratch skip Swing. It’s old, and it’s over. Sun never really cared for the client like it did the server. Swing has been maintained poorly and not much progress has taken place since it was first written. JavaFX is not yet there, and suffers from lots of Swing’s sins. I’d say look at Apache Pivot. Lots of new ideas and better design and an active community.