Swt/Jface in Action: GUI Design with Eclipse 3.0 [Paperback]

Matthew Scarpino (Author), Stephen Holder (Author), Stanford Ng (Author), Laurent Mihalkovic (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 28, 2004 | Series: In Action

Covering Eclipse's new capability for building graphical user interfaces with version 3.0, the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) and JFace, this guide demonstrates how these award-winning tools have received broad support for creating desktop applications. Theory and practical examples reveal how to build GUIs that combine the look and feel of native interfaces with the platform independence of Java. This guide also shows how SWT makes use of the widgets provided by the operating system and describes how these components can be associated with events, containers, and graphics. With this knowledge, programmers can build fully featured user interfaces that communicate directly with the underlying platform. JFace's ability to simplify and organize the process of GUI design is then demonstrated, enabling developers to modify and adapt components, and separate their information from their appearance.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"An excellent book . . . and I can strongly recommend it." -- JavaRanch.com

"Well-structured . . . covering every aspect needed by the GUI developer." -- JavaReference.com

About the Author

Matthew Scarpino has more than 10 years of software design and engineering experience. He uses Eclipse to build editing software for reconfigurable computing and has submitted code for Eclipse's graphical library. He lives in Fort Worth, Texas. Stephen Holder is a software engineer who has worked as a consultant for several large commercial and government agencies on enterprise-level Java projects, including writing Eclipse plugins to streamline the development process. He lives in Tustin, California. Stanford Ng is the cofounder of Nuglu, LLC, and is currently working on improving backend systems at Automotive.com, one of the top five automotive e-commerce sites. He is also a creator of the award-winning Proxy/MAM research project. He lives in Irvine, California. Laurent Mihalkovic is a technology consultant with 10 years of experience designing solutions in C/C++/Java/COM. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Ng is the cofounder of Nuglu, LLC and directing software development at ciMediaGroup, a division of Creative Images.

Product Details

• Paperback: 468 pages
• Publisher: Manning Publications (November 28, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932394273
• ISBN-13: 978-1932394276
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,082,097 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Solid coverage of SWT/JFace, December 22, 2004

By 

Thomas Paul (Plainview, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Swt/Jface in Action: GUI Design with Eclipse 3.0 (Paperback)

SWT and JFace are the graphical libraries developed by IBM as an alternative to Swing to improve performance of GUI applications (specifically Eclipse) written in Java. This book offers a thorough introduction to SWT/JFace. The authors avoid getting into a Swing vs. SWT/JFace debate although they do provide a comparison of the two libraries.

The book starts with a look at writing a program in SWT and then rewriting it using JFace. The authors compare the two approaches and give a good description of why you would want to use one over the other. The next few chapters look at the basic widgets, layout managers, event handling, and graphics contexts. Later chapters cover more advanced widgets such as trees, viewers, tables, menus, dialogs, and wizards. The last chapter looks at GUI development using Eclipse's Rich Client Platform. The appendices cover development within Eclipse and integrating SWT/JFace applications with OLE and ActiveX.

Overall this book does a great job of explaining SWT/JFace at a good level of detail. The book includes a reasonable amount of code samples as well as UML diagrams that help explain how these libraries work. The authors should have chosen a better sample application to demonstrate use of the libraries and there aren't enough screen shots included which may leave you wondering what some of the widgets look like. Other than these two minor complaints, this is an excellent book to learn how to use SWT/JFace and I can strongly recommend it.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars poorly strucured and organized, January 15, 2006

By 

BJH "BJH" (Maryland, United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Swt/Jface in Action: GUI Design with Eclipse 3.0 (Paperback)

"SWT/JFace in Action" proceeds to build a monolithic UI "application" consisting of a dozen or so widgets. Other than creating the widgets and putting them into an application, the book has little else to offer. Many chapters include tables of descriptions copied verbatim from the SWT/JFace Javadocs, with no additional verbage provided. There is very little coverage of event handling, or layouts. After presenting pages of vacuous descriptions like "setActionDefinitionID(String) - Sets an Action definition identifier" (p.73), each chapter concludes with the absurd statement "Now you are an expert." It would be funny if you had not just wasted $30 on the book.

The silliest chapter is that of image-handling which contains a bizarre program to generate and save animated GIFs as files (why is this important to UIs?). After plodding through the process of generating images pixel-by-pixel (does anyone generate images pixel-by-pixel? doesnt everyone use methods to draw lines, arcs, elipses, & polygons?) the authors present a program to produce animated GIFs as files. The code contains strings of bytes (e.g., new byte[] {56, -67, 98, 54, -4, 2 }) with no explanation. My impression is that the author had this program on his PC and could not think of anything else to do with it but to include it in the book. The highlight is when the animated GIF is placed into the main application and the author comments that unfortunately, SWT does not provide functionality to animate it. LOL.

I recommend that you read the Javadocs before you buy this book. If you need additional help, look for a reference other than this book.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Small wonder, February 9, 2005

By 

Ernest Friedman-Hill "JavaRanch Sheriff" (Gaithersburg, MD United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Swt/Jface in Action: GUI Design with Eclipse 3.0 (Paperback)

As many people know by now, SWT and JFace are the GUI libraries used to create Eclipse, the popular open-source Java IDE. As fewer people know, these libraries can be used to build other applications as well. This book will teach you how. Its 13 chapters and four fat appendices give you all the information you'll need to create your own GUIs using this exciting new technology.

JFace is built on top of SWT just as Swing is built on AWT. Most books, quite naturally, discuss these layers separately. This book is unusual because it discusses SWT and JFace simultaneously. This is more useful for the reader as she gains an appreciation for all her options at once.

At barely over 450 pages, this is a comparatively small book on this large topic. It doesn't feel like anything is missing, though, although sometimes it feels a little cramped. The book is jam-packed with useful information and lots of code. For a book on graphics, however, there are curiously few screen shots. This, and some odd organizational choices (especially the relegation of GEF to an appendix,) are my only complaints about this otherwise serviceable work.