Articles by ALEXFROMSUN

Swing in a better world: Static fields vs AppContext

| 0The problems that are related to the application context might be invisible from the outside of the Swing core libraries, but it has been a big deal for the Swing toolkit developers. Every time when you create a mutable static field in a Swing class you...

Swing in a better world: Compound components

By alexfromsun

8353 | 0Swing makes it very easy to control and modify simple components like JLabel or JButton. It gets trickier when you customize a compound component like JTree or JTable. Unlike a simple component, JTable consists of multiple subcomponents like table...

Swing in a better world: Listeners

By alexfromsun

| 0In the list of the things that needs improving in Swing, the implementation of listeners takes the first place. The problem is the fact that the order in which listeners are notified is not specified and it is not even guaranteed that your listeners will...

Swing in a better world: Generics and arrays

By alexfromsun

| 351Generics doesn't work well with arrays. Everybody knows that you can't create a generified array, but not many people really know what it was done this way. A nice article fromBrian Goetzhelped me to understand the problem when I studied the new features...

Swing in a better world: Checked exceptions

By alexfromsun

| 767Checked exceptions are painful. I could write a long article about it, but there are more than enough good blogs describing this problem.My favorite article is written byRod Waldhoff. From my point of view the existence of theInvocationTargetExceptionclearly...

Swing in a better world: Checked exceptions

By alexfromsun

Swing in a better world: java interfaces

By alexfromsun

| 0We have all read the "Effective Java" book and know that we should prefer interfaces over abstract classes. This is a known and respected pattern which should be used wherever possible. However the years in the JDK team tauhgt me not to blindly...

Swing in a better world

By alexfromsun

| 0I truly love the Swing GUI toolkit, I enjoy its flexibility, opennes and great abilities. I know that some people say that Swing is too difficult to learn, and I partly accept it because it took me several years working in the Swing team to get the whole...