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Hans Muller's Blog
«Another 40 Swing Component Libraries |
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| Your Christmas shopping troubles are over: more than 40 Java Markup Language Editors »
And then there were more than 50: More Swing Component LibrariesPosted by hansmuller on October 14, 2004 at 01:13 PM | Comments (9)The javadesktop.org Swing Component Depot column has a backlog of more than 50 component suites. They'll all appear there eventually however we thought you'd like to see the queue now, in all its unadorned glory. So, here for your delectation is a brief summary of all 50+ of them. I appreciated the comments in response to the original version of this blog ("Another 40 Swing Component Libraries") that have appeared here on javadesktop.org and on JavaLobby.org, particularly the many suggestions about libraries that deserved to be added to the list. Some of the feedback pointed out that it wasn't entirely clear where I was drawing the line, not every library listed here was a Swing Component suite. I have to admit that didn't religously hew to that line. Looking at web sites devoted to Swing component suites often lead to products that were relevant to Swing app developers like spell checkers, PDF generators, and so on. A few of these have made it into the list because I couldn't help but inadvertantly vacuum them up in the process of collecting vital statistics about mainline Swing component libraries. In this update I've added another 14 libraries to the list, nearly all of the ones suggested by people who've offered feedback:
One suggestion that led to to a few extra entries that probably don't, strictly speaking, belong was Hypergraph. Hypergraph is an impressive open source project that has produced a J2SE component for visualizing hyperbolic trees. There are several commercial projects in this space: Inxight, Thinkmap, and TheBrain.com. All of these products provide applet viewers for hyperbolic trees and all of them have eye-popping demos on their respective web sites (go ahead and look, you will not be disappointed). Both Inxight and Thinkmap provide SDKs, however based on my cursory look at their sites, the SDKs are for server side work or they're custom JDK1.1 viewers based on AWT. In fact I didn't list TheBrain.com at all, despite the inspiring name, since there didn't appear to be a Java SDK there at all. Still it didn't seem right not mention them since they're great examples of what desktop Java is capable of and they could probably become part of a modern Swing application. Plus, the Hypergraph site provided pointers to all of them and I just couldn't stop myself. Warning: in many cases I've lifted or crudely paraphrased vendor product descriptions in the list below, rather than craft my own pithy summary. It's not because I'm incapable of doing a good job of that, it's because I'm lazy and life is short. It's also worth pointing out that I'm not trying promote the relative merits of these packages, just their existence. There are more than 50 entries in the list below and that's more than the most devoted fan of Swing component libraries is going to want to sift through. I've attempted to break the entries into categories to ease the burden a bit: General Purpose, Database, Graphs and Charts, Special Purpose (for physics, astronomy, oil exploration, etc, components look here first), Calendars, and "More". Naturally not every library fits nicely into one of these categories, for example nearly every general purpose library contains calendar or database parts. The "More" category contains libraries that didn't fit into a category. There are two (obvious) additional categories that are missing because they're big enough to deserve their own roll-up: layout managers and look and feels. Those categories will have to wait until a future blog; I've got blisters on my fingers. General Purpose A Java Swing library for creating configurable menus, toolbars and popups. Applications built with Configure can be reconfigured by end-users through direct manipulation of the GUI itself. JAPISoft provides everything from EditX, v an XML Editor and XSLT Debugger, to most of the components you'd need to build a software engineering tool, like an IDE. Among the Swing parts you'll find on the site are JXMLPad, a Swing component/framework for editing XML/XHTML documents, JDock, a Swing framework for MDI applications that is compatible with standard layout managers, and JResourceBrowser a generalization of JFileChooser. Most of the software is vailable for free evaluation and the sites, www.JAPISoft.com and www.SwingAll.com, are packed with screenshots. JSuite is a broad suite of Swing and AWT components, including charts (notably Gantt charts), tables and grids, calenders and schedules. Jeppers is a full featured web-based spreadsheet editor (free!) written in Java. It also provides an LGPL grid component that can be used in Swing applications. Check out this applet demo that launches the spreadsheet in its own window. ICESoft has been building pure Java web rendering software for quite a long time. They now have three big products:
Javaio - WebWindow, Component Suite, JModeler Loads of very high level parts here, beginning with the WebWindow browser component. WebWindow is a small pure Java HTML viewer that's intended to take up the slack from Swing's JEditorPane. JModeler is a generic diagram editor for building modeling applications and the Javaio Component Suite includes components like JOutlookBar (this sort of thing is sometimes called an "accordion" control), JHelpView for JavaHelp, and JSlidePanel for animating panels in and out of view. A big collection of Swing components (free!) including a font chooser, a directory chooser, and many other useful parts and dialogs. Try them out with this web started demo. Eltima - Visual Java/Swing Components Library A large suite of Swing components, from borders and buttons to date and color choosers. There's a nice looking general purpose image viewer in the mix and some high octane combobox variations as well. A general purprose collection of components. Some examples: JDataGrid (spreadsheet style table) JCalendar (date picker), JFontChooser, JLinkButton (button that can launch a URL), and a suite of custom layout managers. This component library from JGraph.com includes two Swing components: JAutoCombo and JTreeComboBox. JAutoCombo is a combo box with auto-completion, JTreeComboBox is a combo box where the user selects a node from a tree rather than an item from a list (good for large hierarchical sets of alternatives). Check out the web started demos for JAutoCombo and JTreeCombo components on the JGraph site. SyGem Software's collection of Swing Components are designed to provide Java Application programmers with a complete range of GUI widgets to complement and enhance any existing Swing interface. UltraSwing provides easy-to-use components that allow you to create polished, modern GUI applications. With this library, you can easily add advanced features, such as docking/floating, Outlook type side menu, to your GUI projects. A small (only 64K) library of Swing components, including a nice selection of color choosers. zBlueSoftware - Java Components Presently zBlueSoftware provides two components: ZCalendar - a data chooser for all locales, and zFontChooser - font chooser dialog or toolbar element. This company also makes a Java IDE called zBlueStudio. MultiSoftGroup - Blazze GUI Framework Blazze provides you with a set of prepared and common used elements of a user interface. These elements are joined together by intuitive presentation logic. As a result we have got universal, generally used GUI framework which can be used for most of business applications like CRM, ERP and others. Free! Check out the web started demo. An open source docking framework; now with alpha composited drag previewing! Components! is a robust collection of sophisticated components for JFC/Swing, including general purpose calendar and calculator components. An open source project with many things to offer, including a nice suite of custom Swing components. UICompiler makes it possible to take designs created with TrollTech's Qt Designer and compile them into Swing applications with a custom look and feel. Try the to see the end product in action.EII Commons - an open source library of commonly useful components. Among them are: a sortable JTable/model, a wizard framework, a a set of masked edit controls, a print preview widget that works with any Pageable, various tree, table, and list utilities, and more. Zeus is an open source Java Swing component library. It provides useful swing components for easier GUI development: JSplash and JConsole. The Kiwi Toolkit is a foundation class library containing many useful classes that complement the Java Foundation Classes (JFC). The toolkit includes many classes and components that were not provided with the JFC, such as a TreeTable component, a command line parser, a DateChooser dialog, and many others. Database Simprit Swing is an addon package for Java Swing. Simprit Swing includes useful data entry components to improve your users' data input experience, and some new components such as tool bar pane, calendar and date picker to impress your users The DBDataControl provides a fast and efficient way to retrieve and edit data from any relational database. SwingSet is an open source toolkit for making Swing database-aware. SwingSet utilizes SSTextDocument, an extension of the standard PlainDocument class to link the JTextField or JTextArea to a database column within a RowSet. In addition, custom classes are provided to replace the standard JComboBox and JCheckBox. An app framework for Swing with support for data binding, validation, and so on. JForm is a framework for building form-based user interfaces with Swing. It provides a library of custom Swing components that supports automatic databinding and validation. Graphs and Charts JUNG, the Java Universal Network/Graph Framework, is a software library that provides a common and extendible language for the modeling, analysis, and visualization of data that can be represented as a graph or network. Check out the JUNG applet demos here. JGo is a graphics library that makes it easy to build custom interactive diagrams, network or workflow editors, connected graphs, scheduling or organizational charts, smart maps, flowcharts, and software design tools. It has built-in support for many shapes, text, images, containers, connectors, orthogonal links, arrowheads, scrolling, zooming, selection, drag-and-drop, resizing, in-place text editing, tooltips, layers, and multi-page printing. It is powerful and efficient, yet small and easy to learn and use. It includes built-in support for Swing's Undo framework. Dirk's J Toolkit (DJT) - Gantt Chart Class Library DJT is used for developing sophisticated Gantt chart solutions for a big variety of applications that range from operation-based scheduling applications to enterprise resource planning applications (ERP). HyperGraph is an open source project which provides java code to work with hyperbolic geometry and especially with hyperbolic trees. It provides a very extensible api to visualize hyperbolic geometry, to handle graphs and to layout hyperbolic trees. Inxight's application and component SDK products are focused on "information discovery" and visualization. Among them are StarTree for visualizing large collections of objects and TableLens for visualizing large tables. The SDKs are for the 1.1 JRE however they're extremely capable. Check out the demos and see for yourself. The Thinkmap SDK enables organizations to incorporate data-driven visualization technology into their enterprise Web applications. Thinkmap applications allow users to make sense of complex information in ways that traditional interfaces are incapable of. Thinkmap's display is a JDK1.1 applet, see The Visual Thesaurus for a great example. Special Purpose JSky - Java Components for Astronomy JSky is being developed as part of the Gemini Observing Tool, which astronomers will use to plan their observations at the Gemini Telescope in Chile. Don't miss this press release about a recent Gemini telescope observation: "Like Nothing Seen Before - New Object Defies Classification". FreeHEP (High Energy Physics) Java Library The goal of the open source FreeHEP library is to encourage the sharing and reuse of Java code in High Energy Physics. Although some of the code is fairly specific to HEP, other code is more generic and could be used by anyone. To maximize reuse we strive to keep the dependencies between various packages in the FreeHEP library to a minimum, so you can use which ever parts interest you without being forced to use the entire library. J/GeoToolkit delivers high performance graphics capabilities for Oil and Gas E&P applications. ESRI - MapObjects Java Edition A rich collection of client and server components for Java developers. MapObjects-Java Edition can be used to build custom applications that incorporate GIS and mapping capabilities or to extend the capabilities of existing applications. TWaver is a complete suite of Java graphic components for telecommunication operations support system (OSSs). LAB Asprise! - Java Image Acquisition UI Components Presently there are two components in this free library:
Financial and mathematical J2SE Components. Use our JavaBeans compliant Java Class Libraries within any Java solution: JDBC enabled, detailed PDF technical documentation, JavaDocs, bundled GUI JavaBeans and client examples. The open source Gandalf wizard framework consists of a set of classes and interfaces that give developers an infrastructure to build wizards. Two types of wizards are currently supported: web-based wizards and Swing-based. JBalloonToolTip is the first true java implementation of balloon-like tooltips. It allows you to use the whole power of old-fashioned java tooltips (font, color, size, html formating, etc.) and modern ballon-like layout. G is a generic graphics library built on top of Java 2D in order to make scene graph oriented 2D graphics available to client applications in a high level, easy to use way. Starlink is a set of Java data reduction and analysis tools and Java data access classes. The new Java tools and classes are needed to produce applications in the Virtual Observatory (VO) era, and to complement the AstroGrid and other VO capabilities. Among the many examples of this software in action is SPLAT, a spectral analysis tool. Calendars A configurable date chooser panel. A customizable combo box style date chooser. This site offers some other generally useful components: JCalendarCombo, JCascadedPane, JDirectoryDialog, and a file splitting utility with its own GUI. A set of data chooser components and panels (free!). You can give them a try with the web started demo. LavanTech - Date and Time Selector Component A configurable date and time chooser; panels and combo box style controls. More Pendulum is a Swing MVC and application framework built upon OpenSymphony's XWork and PicoContainer. It's primary purpose is to simplify and separate Swing. PDFBox is a Java PDF Library. This project will allow access to all of the components in a PDF document. More PDF manipulation features will be added as the project matures. This ships with a utility to take a PDF document and output a text file. JPDF-Creator is a fast, reliable, Java2D based component designed to dynamically generate new PDF documents. Using jPDF Creator, businesses can easily add PDF generation functionality to their java client applications. Support for background printing and spooling of AWT and Swing components. JChain SA is a toolkit for copy protection and license management of Java applications. Foxtrot is an easy and powerful API to use threads with the JavaTM Foundation Classes (JFC/Swing). The Foxtrot API are based on a new concept, the Synchronous Model, that allow you to easily integrate in your Swing code time-consuming operations without incurring in "GUI-freeze" problem, typical of Swing applications. Bookmark blog post:  del.icio.us  Digg  DZone  Furl  Reddit
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