Josh On Design

Hans just announced the first prototype implementation of JSR 296, the Swing Application Framework. I'm very excited about this because it will make Swing applications a lot easier to build and more maintainable. I'm even more excited because we will have top notch support for JSR 296 in NetBeans 6.0. I know this because I'm one of the developers working on it.

Our current work in NetBeans isn't very usable yet, but I thought I'd give you a few screenshots to let you see how it's developing.

Using JSR 296 you can create actions from plain methods by using the @Action annotation. Once you have done this NetBeans can search through your application to find all actions and then let you edit them.

There are three ways to work with Actions. First, you can select from a list of known actions in the property sheet (Fig 1)

Fig 1: the Action Property Editor in the property sheet

Second you can press the '...' button to open the full Action Property Editor dialog.(Fig 2)

Fig 2: the Action Property Editor Dialog

And finally you can use the global action list to see all actions and edit them. (Fig 3)

Fig 3: the Global Action List

Coming soon, more Swing Labs updates!