I need to develop a fairly large java application that will be
delivered to a a large number of heterogeneous clients, probably via
Web Start. My team has some experience with AWT. AWT is not
sufficient for our purposes, mostly or even entirely because it lacks
a table widget, and our GUI will need a lot of tables, with decent
functionality such as dynamic column selection and re-sorting.
It seems to me that one option is to create such a widget using Swing;
in fact, I learned some Swing about 3 or 4 years ago and created a
basic prototype, but that needs a lot of enhancement. However, we
have limited manpower these days and would like to avoid the steep
Swing learning curve, particularly since what we mostly need is a
table widget.
Another option would be to purchase a package, but it is essential
that we minimize our footprint; our old system uses KL Group's jar of
widgets (now Sitraka), and the low bandwidth of some of our current
users makes that huge jar file unacceptable for the new architecture.
I am wondering whether any of the current GUI builders might have a
table widget that does not necessitate downloading a huge jar. Or,
perhaps SWT or some other toolkit might work, but I know nothing about
them and, again, am concerned about downloading a huge library to the
client. To emphasize: my mandate is to develop a rich client's
functionality while minimizing the footprint.
Any suggestions would be gratefully appreciated.
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Roedy Green - 08 Sep 2003 03:44 GMT
>Another option would be to purchase a package, but it is essential
>that we minimize our footprint; our old system uses KL Group's jar of
>widgets (now Sitraka)
What you could do is keep pruning the Sitraka jar. There are
jarbuilders that should help. There is no need to download the
classes you don't need.
Swing tables are pretty simple. You just implement AbstractTable
model or implement TableModel to hold your data. The main trick is
doing it single thread.
If you need something fancy in the table display part, you could get
someone like me to write you a custom cell renderer. Your team does
not have to learn much about Swing at all.
--
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
Coaching, problem solving, economical contract programming.
See http://mindprod.com/jgloss/jgloss.html for The Java Glossary.