Mauro Carniel

In Part 1 of this article, I introduced rich client development, available architectures for developing rich client applications based on the Swing toolkit, and technologies that could be used to make development more productive. In this second part, I'll compare the most popular IDEs and evaluate them with an eye to Swing development for rich client applications. Swing-based Rich Clients: Support for Java IDEs There are many development environments available for the Java platform, each of them provides all sorts of features that can be applied in developing various kinds of Java applications - Web applications, desktop applications, mobile applications, SOA, etc. - and use the various Java distributions - Java EE, Java SE, Java ME. In this article Java IDE evaluation is restricted to rich client application development based on a Swing front-end. Hence in this IDE ... (more)

Developing Rich Client Applications Using Swing

Before describing solutions available for rich client application development, it would be a good idea to explain what exactly a rich client application is and which rich client topologies can feasibly be built using the Java platform. In the main, a rich client is a part of a software system that contains a user interface (UI) and whose front end is "rich," i.e., the user interface has rich graphical content and is highly interactive; a rich client application is also called a desktop application, since it provides content and functionalities that are usually provided by applic... (more)

Developing Rich Internet Applications Using Swing

The Java development platform always provides limited support for application development based on a graphical user interface, an area where more traditional languages and integrated development environments (IDEs) such as Visual Basic or Delphi have based their success. Today the Java SE distribution offers essentially the same features it offered in 1999 with regards to Java graphical components: the Swing toolkit. Swing provides graphical components like grids, trees, text fields, checkbox, radio button, combo-box and others. Anyway these components have changed little and no... (more)