Superficial
is a fresh approach to design and coding of GUI applications
that bridges the gap between general concepts such as Model-View-Controller
(MVC) and widget toolkits such as Java Swing,
Superficial's novel conceptual approach
offers practical resolutions to key issues in construction
and management of GUI applications, covering much of the same
ground as the now-inactive JSR
295 and JSR
296.
Superficial provides a powerful solution for data binding
and application construction. Applications can be developed
using Superficial with such features 'out of the box' as
- concise, semi-declarative definition of widget layouts
- advanced data binding, transparent to client code
- multiple viewers on the same content
- multiple content open at the same time (MDI interface)
- data transfer (cut and paste, drag and drop) between
viewers
- multiple content types in the same application
- custom painting and manipulation in viewers
The spike application (WebStart
requiring Java
plug-in) demonstrates the full range of features offered
by Superficial, while a tutorial
provides basic coding examples.
The Facets implementation
of Superficial in Java includes a binding to the Swing toolkit,
and provides for binding to custom Swing components.
Exploring Superficial
To explore the potential of Superficial for your GUI development
projects, you can
- get an overview of the core Superficial
concepts
- take the coding tutorial
- explore the Java API of the Facets
implementation of Superficial
- download the latest Facets distribution
- download the white
paper for a detailed account of how Superficial works
Superficial in use
Real-world applications coded with Facets
include the following:
- XmlView
- Simple utility that can be extended to produce more complex
XML-based applications.
- pdfInspect
- Wraps the Apache PDFBox
library in a rich GUI including custom content viewers.
© 2011 David M Wright
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