Swing Hacks: Tips and Tools for Killer GUIs

by Joshua Marinacci and Chris Adamson

Book Overview

Swing Hacks helps Java developers move beyond the basics of Swing, the graphical user interface (GUI) standard since Java 2. If you're a Java developer looking to build enterprise applications with a first-class look and feel, Swing is definitely one skill you need to master. This latest title from O'Reilly is a reference to the cool stuff in Swing. It's about the interesting things you learn over the years--creative, original, even weird hacks--the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0596009070
• ISBN13: 9780596009076
• Release Date: July 2005
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 542 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

finally a useful book with no bla-bla

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.

Belongs In Your Swing Toolkit

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.

Excellent

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.

Innovative, insightful and inspirational

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.

Finally, a great Swing 'power user book'

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.