Customer Reviews

Swing Hacks: Tips and Tools for Killer GUIs

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I'm surprised that it's taken this many years for a book like this to make it to market. There are good Swing books available, but they rarely go beyond the basics. As soon as I heard about this one, I pre-ordered and began waiting.

It essentially consists of 99 power 'tricks' for creating WOW effects in your user interfaces. Some are eye candy that you'd probably never put in a production application, but I'd say 80%+ could be applied to every day app's. I'll be spending many hours pouring over the details of each hack to gain the deep insight offered by this book.

This book is going to allow me to reach the next level of Swing polish. I find it hard to believe that most people that consider themselves Swing developers wouldn't gain a lot from reading this book. Run, don't walk, and get this book.

There are a few minor disappointments, but I emphasis minor. The production quality seems a bit rushed as there was quite a few obvious errors in the preface alone, although not of a technical nature. Perhaps only the preface escaped any editing oversight, since the remainder of the book had nothing that jumped out at me.

As usual today, the examples are all available for download from OReilly's website. But I wonder why they didn't take the extra step of providing runnable versions of each hack. You have to compile each one - a minor annoyance. When browsing the book it would have been cool to be able to just double-click an associated jar file to see the effect in action.

The author clearly uses a Macintosh, since all (perhaps I missed one or two) the screen shots are from a Mac, and some of the Hacks relate to duplicating Mac OS features. Seeing that the majority of Swing applications are probably deployed on Windows machines, a bit more emphasis on Windows would have been more appropriate. And the screen shots could have used a cross-platform look-and-feel instead of the Mac OS.

In short summary, the good, the bad, and the ugly...

The Good: Insanely great tricks for getting the most out of Swing.

The Bad: Perhaps too much Macintosh focus and not enough Windows (XP).

The Ugly: Probably a bit rushed out the door since there are some glaring production mistakes, like chapter summaries without the chapter names or numbers, etc.

This book is a pretty good one in the O'Reilly hack series, showing 100 specific tricks that you can do with Swing that you don't normally find in books or websites on the subject.
Chapter 6, "Transparent and Animated Windows," is one of my favorites because it helps my Swing components look a little more Mac-like. Creating transparent windows, creating frame-anchored sheets for dialogs, animating the sheet dialog, and sliding notes out from the taskbar are some of the hacks in that chapter. All it takes is a little knowledge of the Swing heavyweight component glass pane, and you're up and running. Buried in Hack 54 is an invaluable gem: Want to antialias all the text on your Swing application without touching any code? No problem, just add the following definition to the command line when you invoke your application:
java -Dswing.aatext=true MyStartClass
Chapter 10, "Audio," is also a good chapter to look at, because many Swing programmers tend to overlook sound as an important part of their application, plus since I am a multimedia programmer it is the kind of topic I would enjoy anyways. Maybe you want the swishing sound of a folder closing or of a clanging trash can when you throw away something in your Swing application. Hacks 70 through 73 discuss playing sounds with applets, JavaSound, the Java Media Framework, and Quicktime for Java technologies. Hack 74 shows you how to add MP3 support to the Java Media Framework API as well. This is not really a Swing hack, but it is simple to do and interesting.
Chapter 12, "Miscellany," presents us with some obvious tricks and some very important tips. For example, most programmers know that whenever they write event-handling code, such as an ActionListener that gets called when a button is pressed, they need to handle things quickly. You never want to spend any more time than you have to processing on the event-handling thread, or your GUI will become nonresponsive and be unable to repaint itself efficiently. Taking on a larger task often means kicking off a separate "worker" thread from the event-dispatching thread and letting that run in the background. However, what many beginning Swing programmers forget is that Swing is not thread-safe, which means that if you have GUI updates from that worker thread, you should always execute them back on the event-dispatching thread. In short, this means you should create another Runnable thread that kicks off serially with other GUI updates on the event-dispatching thread. You can do so by executing it with a call to SwingUtilities.invokeLater(myGUIUpdateThread).
Now for the few hacks that I did not like:
Hack #17 "Reorder a JList with Drag-and-Drop" is a good example of something potentially useful that just doesn't quite look right when you code it up and execute it.
Hack #42 "Make Your Frame Dissolve", is so bad it's almost funny, and would best be described as a failed hack.
Hack #48 "Make Text Components Searchable" is a really weak implementation, not even bothering to use highlighters. There's a much better example in Kim Topley's "Core Swing: Advanced Programming", which is out of print though it has some worthwhile content even now.
Hack #59 "Create a Color Eyedropper" is so visually bad that you will cringe when it executes.
However, I would not let these few failed hacks detract from the overall value of such a unique book. However, you might want to go to O'Reilly & Associates website and download the code first to see if this book is really up your alley before you purchase it. I see that the table of contents is not listed by Amazon, so I do that here for the purpose of completeness:
Chapter 1. Basic JComponents
Chapter 2. Lists and Combos
Chapter 3. Tables and Trees
Chapter 4. File Choosers
Chapter 5. Windows, Dialogs, and Frames
Chapter 6. Transparent and Animated Windows
Chapter 7. Text
Chapter 8. Rendering
Chapter 9. Drag-and-Drop
Chapter 10. Audio
Chapter 11. Native Integration and Packaging
Chapter 12. Miscellany

Most Java programmers, if they use the Swing GUI toolkit at all, use it in a fairly superficial way, accepting default configurations for most components and letting the built-in "look and feel" supply the appearance and behavior. The more knowledgeable programmer might know how to adopt the platform-specific look and feels on each platform. But it's quite rare for a Swing programmer to customize things much beyond that.

All of which is really a shame. Swing is like that cliched iceberg: just the spare top of it floats above the surface, with the vast bulk of possibility submerged and lurking in the depths. In this clever book, Marinacci and Adamson show you how to mine those depths and come up with GUIs that don't look like Java applications at all.

The book is a collection of recipes for achieving some really spectacular effects. I appreciated that lot of thought seems to have been put into making the examples small enough for a book. There are only a few multi-page listings among the 100 recipes between these covers.

If I have a complaint, it's that the book has a fairly obvious slant toward the Mac OS X platform. Many of the hacks are devoted to making your application emulate some OS X feature or another. In a way, this is justifiable -- after all, OS X's GUI includes many innovations not included in Swing by default -- but it's likely to leave those folks primarily interested in making Swing fit in better on Windows a little jealous.

This book gives a good set of more in depth approaches to building GUI in Swing. While reading it I had a lot of 'that's interesting' moments. However, a lot of the examples feel more like an idea of what needs to be done to achieve something rather than a complete (and robust) implementation. What is more disappointing, I found that some advice in the book is misleading. For example Hack #57 demonstrates how to use the glass pane to intercept and riderect mouse events. Unfortunately, as demonstrated, this approach doesn't work at all in the applications that use any components that have menus. A very significant shortcoming, in my opinion, that is not mentioned in the book.

Lacking some up-to-date information is usually not a problem that impacts most books. You can usually pull out one or two decent tricks, methodologies or pieces of information you didn't know before. This book, however, falls flat on its face.

Filled with completely useless "hacks", use of extremely common knowledge/practices and general lack of content make this book a complete waste. Beginners may find the information interesting, but in terms of use in their professional lives, useless. Advanced users will find that other methodologies and "hacks" out there are much more useful and function much more efficiently.

Aside from the uselessness of the information provided for use within enterprise GUI front-ends, what bothered me most was the inefficiency of the data provided. With some simple tweaking, complete rewrites based on the ideas presented, etc. you can come up with much more efficient and powerful components and component extensions yourselves.

Don't waste your time.

If you program in Java, often you have graphical elements in a user interface. The original default AWT widgets have been largely supplanted by Swing widgets. These are more powerful and usually easier to program, as shown in this text.

While the hacks are not meant to be a comprehensive sweep over all the Swing widgets, there is enough variety amongst them to easily show you the abilities. The coding is useful in providing relatively succinct examples. UI programming is often very wordy in the source code. But the hack examples convey working solutions notable for their brevity. In and of itself, this is a virtue of the book. For it shows that Swing can be concisely applied. Less typing, and easier to understand. Which also means easier to debug.

Having been a software developer for many years, I have accumulated boxes and boxes of computer books - some are better than others. This book is simply outstanding. All of the "hacks" are relevant and useful in their adaptability and applicability to real-world use; and they are organized intelligently, meaning that it generally takes only a few moments to find and match a hack that is applicable to a given problem.

The book is written in a conversational tone rather than the dry reference style of many other books. The authors describe the problem space that each hack is intended to address, and then present the solution in words that make you feel like they are speaking directly to you. This makes the book a very easy, almost entertaining read.

Finally, each hack is presented as a free-standing solution. When you find a hack that looks interesting, it can be used without requiring endless references to other sections of the book. For example, there are numerous points where the authors (briefly) re-describe the glass pane, but it is clear that they purposely took this approach to support the free-standing nature of each hack, saving the reader the effort of raffling through the book for supporting information.

If you work with Swing, you'll find yourself reaching for this book on a regular basis.

This is a new one for the Hacks series. A book about interesting variations on a a programming technology. It really works. There isn't a lot of exposition about the code. So I wouldn't expect to learn Swing with this book. But I think you will learn a lot of new stuff about Swing with this book. A large part of the appeal of this book is that you will be inspired to stretch the limits of your Swing use through these hacks. If that sounds appealing to you then this book is definitely for you.

Along with Swing Hacks I bought Swing Second Edition by Robinson and Vorobiev. What a contrast! Marinacci gives concise, fascinating, and useful examples. He leaves out the junk that you can get from reading the API. His hacks are short and remarkably clear. And if a hack doesn't interest you, you can just skip it.

In contrast, R&V dump a ton of junk on you, and you have to sift through it. Most of it is a rehash of the API, plus deadly boring chit-chat about what extends what. You can read and read and read and not learn anything useful.

I'd rank Marinacci up at the top with the Effective Java, the Swing Tutorial and Thinking in Java.

Simply put, this is an incredibly useful book for Swing programmers. I've written a fair amount of GUI code and have needed several all-encompassing Swing books strewn about my desktop while doing so. Each had their own strengths and weaknesses, so if you had the right collection you could pretty much figure out how to do anything. (Except GridBagLayout of course :-)
This book belongs in that collection. It's unlike the other Swing books because it doesn't attempt to walk its way through the entire Swing framework. Instead, it's a collection of 100 neat and useful things one might want to try while implementing a GUI. The beauty is that each "hack" is pretty much self-contained, so if you're interested in something, check it out; if not, don't. (Although I found myself checking out more stuff than I thought I would. Kinda like, "Oh, so that's how you would do that!" It's almost addicting.) This also means you can jump around without being penalized for skipping intervening pages.
One more thing I like: They don't just give you the hack; they explain *why* you need to do certain things. There's so much going on behind the scenes in Swing - especially with things like layout, sizing, and painting - that you can waste a lot of time just because you don't know the one or two lines of code necessary to get something just right. If you *understand* what's going on your quest to discover those couple of all-important lines can be shorter and more enjoyable.