Brennan's Weblog

Learning Swing with Arch4J UI

I work for SpiderLogic and internally for outsourcing jobs we use a framework that we have built over time called Arch4J. It is made up of various components which address common techniques used in past projects which attempt to enforce best practices. The bulk of my experience has been limited to server-side software development, like Perl/CGI, mod_perl, JSP and Servlets. But in the last week I have been thrown onto a project for a desktop Java application written using the Swing API. And that can be intimidating.

But after a week of hacking away at the code and learning how things work in practice I am finding it to be much more approachable than my overactive imagination made it out to be. There are still some areas that simply work due to some unknown magic, but I am content adding the new features requested of me and ensuring that works.

It helps a little to be using the Arch4J UI, but it can also get in the way. Sometimes I would like to be able to reference standard practices through examples in books and articles on Swing, but since Arch4J UI objects are also in play, I have to look into code with minimal documentation. It just happens the Arch4J UI code is the least documented code in the software suite. So today I will be getting access to the CVS codebase held at SourceForge so that I can start documenting it and learning how all of these non-standard widgets work.