John O'Conner's Blog

Swing Fuse and the Swing Application Framework

Recently I had the opportunity to investigate and write about the Swing Application Framework. Included in that framework is a clever resource injection feature.

Admittedly I'm just learning about the Swing Fuse project, which also provides resource injection. So, my questions may have obvious answers that I simply haven't discovered yet.

The primary developer for Fuse is Romain Guy, right? And I know that Romain has close ties to the Swing desktop team and community. I'd be surprised if he had not been involved somehow with the design and development of the Swing App Framework. Yet, I see repeated references to Fuse and Romain's involvement with that separate project.

I'm curious about what divides the Swing App Framework's resource injection features from Fuse. Certainly the app framework does more than just resource injection, but that is a large bullet point of its functionality list.

So, what does Fuse have that's not in the app framework? And why isn't the Fuse functionality just part of the app framework to begin with? Hmmm...now I have something to research over the weekend, and my wife will have to wait yet another week before I can clean out the garage -- can't say I'll share her disappointment.

Comments

• NIH?

  Posted by: i30817 on November 09, 2007 at 05:11 PM

• Fuse was born right before JavaOne 2006 and it is code I wrote at Sun for Aerith. It is now open sourced under the BSD license. Hans Muller then started working on the Swing Application Framework and took inspiration from Fuse for the resource injection part. Fuse offers more features and the implementation is different. For instance, Fuse can work with SWT.

  Posted by: gfx on November 09, 2007 at 05:32 PM

• i30817: So Fuse was invented at Sun and I was still at Sun when Hans wrote the SAF version.

  Posted by: gfx on November 09, 2007 at 05:33 PM

• I thought a key point of the SAF is that it is not trying to solve all problems or to create an über-framework. The goal is to create an easy-to-use framework for creating straightforward Swing applications. I wouldn't be surprised if they were using a more restricted version of injection which only satisfied that goal. I think the larger issue is whether the SAF forces you to only use its form of DI, or whether there is a way to extend it using something like Fuse. Regards, Patrick

  Posted by: pdoubleya on November 09, 2007 at 11:38 PM

• I've been wondering the same thing. It appear to be a common thing in Java, everyone prefers to write their own framework etc. and eventually a JSR is created and Sun writes their own. I've used JSR-296 for quite a while, and I'm not really convinced that is saves me that much. Resource injection appear to be overused/misused for all kind of things and NetBeans has some trouble reasoning about these relationships and cleaning up. Also, not very easy to hand a large collection of .properties files over to translators when its full of stuff which does not need translation.

  Posted by: mrmorris on November 25, 2007 at 08:32 AM

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.