What are your best Swing design patterns and tips? [closed]

Answer 1

Try not to code the text into your app. Swing guis can be pretty easily written to be data driven, consider defining your GUI in an xml file (including the component names and positions/layout attributes).

I worked on systems that had a LOT of property sheets (which are just piles of controls, page after page of them)--without making it data driven, it's virtually impossible to maintain or internationalize.

If you decide to use a GUI builder, never modify the code it outputs if you can possibly avoid it--it's better to bind to the GUI from an external class. Think about what will happen if you have to do it without the builder--will it be difficult to port? Impossible?

Understand the gotchas in swing--only modifying GUI components from the AWT thread, returning the AWT thread as quickly as possible (spawn a new thread if you have to do anything that takes over 100ms),

Try your best to keep your code DRY--It can be a real programming challenge with Swing GUIs--Again, data driven code is the only way I've found to not constantly repeat code like new JButton("...");

If your data is property-sheet based, seriously consider creating a binding mechanism to tie your controls to your data. A good goal for DRY code would be 0 (ZERO) control-specific lines of code per control to get a piece of data from your database to your GUI, have the user edit it and get it back to your DB. This means that you should be able to add a new control by doing nothing but modifying your data.

Answer 2

Avoid using GUI layout designers (builders). Later on it will make your code much cleaner and easier to maintain.

Answer 3

mvc is your friend.

Answer 4

Use layout managers. You might think it's simpler just to position everything with hard coded positions now (especially if you use a graphical layout tool), but when it comes time to update the gui, or internationalize it, your successors will hate you. (Trust me on this, I was the guy saying to use the layout managers from the start, and the successor to the guy who ignored me.)

Answer 5

I think a good working knowledge of concurrency is often understated. You really need to be familiar with Swing's threading policy and general synchronization techniques to build a responsive GUI and an efficient backend.

Answer 6

Avoid spawning too many threads when user clicks action button multiple times. Disable button on first click, spawn your action in background thread, and when done, enable button again. This may not be problem for short running tasks.