One area of Swing that does not appear to be getting much attention these days (or that may have fallen out of favor with developers) are the elements that make up the Multiple Document Interface: JDesktopPane and JInternalFrame.

I believe that there's tremendous potential in further developing the Swing features in this space.

What I am envisioning is nothing less than a JDesktop that rivals the modern desktops of operating systems today, in terms of feature sets. I'd like to share this vision with you. These would be some of the features in 'my ideal java desktop':

1. the ability to easily dock panels along the edges of a JDesktopPane (I do realize that there exist commercial implementations of this feature today)
2. multiple workspaces (like we have on linux desktops)
3. apple-like features: minimizing frames with effects?
4. ctrl-tabbing to switch between jinternalframes
5. a dock
6. easy default keyboard shortcuts for hiding the current internal frame, or, the one i really like from the macos is 'hide others' (command-option-h)
7. a trash
8. standard window arrangement features such as tile & cascade (why not?)
9. the ability to move/place iconized views of jinternalframes anywhere on the jdesktoppane, to configure the placement behavior ('snap to grid' etc..)

Opportunities are rife for improving this area of the Swing API. I believe such an environment could become the basis for some really nice and powerful rich desktop applications.

I realize I'm not explaining myself fully here. "Why would one want to create effectively a 'desktop within a desktop' type of application??" you may ask.

This raises a much deeper question. It is my belief that desktops today, albeit nice, are an incomplete model of a virtual world. The world of today's operating systems desktops is a poor world of files, folder, and applications. It is a primitive model that I believe could be made significantly richer. The desktop metaphor is effectively an object oriented user interface platform and is an excellent foundation upon which to build applications with rich domains. Imagine the ability to place representations of domain objects in folders, to search/query for objects with the facility that we query files today, to invoke their methods with a right-click gesture, to plug in model extensions, to integrate different models into a single user interface substrate. You'd use the same environment, the same runtime application to do email, to file documents, to write checks, or to do software development. More so, there would exist an overarching consistency in terms of how you manipulate objects, regardless of their type.

Well, I've gone considerably beyond the scope of this blog entry, so I better stop here. :-)