Ethan Nicholas is the lead engineer for the Yahoo! Publishing Tools team, and was the original author of the Swing-based Yahoo! SiteBuilder web design application. In his spare time he is developing JAXX, an XML-based user interface language for creating Java desktop applications.
Swing's great, except for the thousands of lines of manual layout, event wiring, data binding, etc. JAXX offers an alternative: an XML markup that offers faster and more intuitive ways to lay out and wire up your GUI, while still offering tremendous flexibility. Ethan Nicholas shows what's inside...
I know, I know, it's been far too long since I've made an entry. My younger son is ten months old now, so I suppose I should probably stop using "new baby" as an excuse for my laziness...
My sixteen-month-old son is just at the point where he's beginning to play tag, so it's a part of my day-to-day life now. It's fitting that I find myself tagged by...
I've been writing Java code for more than a decade now, and there are a handful of methods I've ended up copying & pasting (or, sadly, reimplementing) in virtually every program I've ever...
When you work at a major Internet company like Yahoo!, deployment is a Big Deal. You have millions of customers running every version of every OS imaginable, some with marginally working...
I'm on vacation with my family right now. Vacation time is pretty hard for me to come by -- one of the dangers of being "essential" is that nobody wants to let you leave -- so this is a...
Swing's mnemonic system is based around two properties: mnemonic (or displayedMnemonic) and displayedMnemonicIndex. They're powerful enough to do everything you need,...
Some time ago I was interviewing candidates for a Senior Java Engineer position. Among the many questions I asked was "What can you tell me about weak references?" I wasn't expecting a detailed...
Memory leaks in Java are fortunately pretty rare, and when they do exist, off-the-shelf tools like JProfiler and OptimizeIt normally make short work of them. So when I discovered that an...
Java suffers from a layout crisis. It ships with a bunch of poorly-thought-out layout managers, a few (like GridLayout and BorderLayout) that are decent within their limited niche, and......
Swing does a great job of separating data (the models) and controls (the components themselves), but it really doesn't do a good job of separating controls from presentation...