Introduction

SwingLabs is an Open Source laboratory for exploring new ways to make Swing applications easier to write, with improved performance and greater visual appeal. It is an umbrella project for various Open Source initiatives sponsored by Sun Microsystems and is part of the java.net community. Successful code and concepts may be migrated to future versions of the Java© platform.

As mentioned, SwingLabs is an umbrella project. Some of the main sub projects include SwingX, DataBinding, and JDIC. Several supporting subprojects also exist, including Deployment and SwingWorker.

SwingLab's SwingX provides a powerful suite of desktop components for all your Swing projects. Available under the LGPL license, the SwingX project is the perfect match for both your professional and personal projects.

DataBinding contains lower level building blocks required for most any data oriented application. It contains Converter and Converters classes for handling data type conversion to/from String. It has a DataSet data structure that is excellent for modeling relational data. Finally, it contains the SwingLabs databinding framework for creating data-aware components and applications that seemlessly hook UI components up to domain data

JDIC provides Java applications with access to facilities provided by the native desktop such as the mailer, the browser, and registered document viewing applications. Additionally it provides the mechanisms by which Java applications can integrate into the native desktop such as registering Java applications as document viewers on the desktop, creating tray icons on the desktop and creating installer packages.

System Requirements

SwingLabs is a Java 5 ("Tiger") based library. The Java Virtual Machine on your target systems must be 1.5 or later.

Because the JDIC project uses native code to integrate with the system desktop, it takes a little more work to install.

JDIC API:

  • Supported platforms
    • WinME/NT/2000/XP/2003, Sun Java Desktop System (JDS) Release 1 or later, SuSE Linux 7.1 or later, RedHat Linux 8 or later, Solaris 8 or later (package org.jdesktop.jdic.tray requires Solaris JDS 3).
  • Additional software
    • Windows: Internet Explorer 5 or later, or Mozilla 1.4 or later.
    • Linux/Solaris: Gnome 2.0, Ximian Evolution 1.4 or later, Mozilla 1.4 or later.
    • J2SE v1.4.2 or later.

JDIC Packager:

  • Supported platforms
    • WinME/NT/2000/XP/2003, Sun Java Desktop System (JDS) Release 1 or later, SuSE Linux 7.1 or later, RedHat Linux 8 or later, Solaris 8 or later.
  • Additional software

Installation Instructions

For all projects other than JDIC, you simply need to put the proper jar files on the classpath prior to running your application. In the root swinglabs directory, you will see the swinglabs-X.X.jar (where X.X is the build number of the jar file). This jar contains SwingWorker, SwingX, DataBinding, and JDIC API. This is a convenience build containing the 4 most common jar files.

Individual jar files are located in the dist/ directory, and dependent libraries (libraries you must have on your classpath from 3rd party projects) are found in /lib.

For example, the following will launch MyApp assuming it requires DataBinding, SwingX, and SwingWorker to function properly:

In Windows

c:\myapp>java -cp swinglabs-0.8.0.jar;jga-0.7.2-cddl.jar;myapp.jar com.myapp.Main

In Unix/Linux

/myap$ java -cp swinglabs-0.8.0.jar:jga-0.7.2-cddl.jar:myapp.jar com.myapp.Main

As before, instructions are more complicated for JDIC. For full instructions, see the official JDIC installation instructions