Appendix B: The Spring Rich Project

Overview

The Spring Rich (Spring Rich Client) framework allows you to develop Swing-based applications using all the concepts you have learned in this book. More specifically, Spring Rich offers you all the following features:

  • A declarative configuration, a bean lifecycle, and transaction management.

  • An abstraction layer for building MDI-style rich client applications.

  • A comprehensive GUI framework that links specific actions to the user interface (UI) elements. You can further group the actions using standard UI elements such as menus, toolbars, and pop-up menus.

  • A data binding framework you can use to transfer the values from the UI elements to the underlying model. This model can be represented by simple JavaBeans, Maps, rowsets, or any custom data access strategy implementation.

  • Forms and a form builder API that simplifies development of declarative forms with UI elements you can create using the provided metadata. In other words, the UI elements are created based on the type of the underlying property.

  • Helper classes for producing GUI standards following dialogs, wizards, tables, and lists.

  • Helper services for i18n and centralized component construction.

  • Integration with JGoodies Forms, JGoodies Looks, Glazed Lists, Acegi, Spin, and Foxtrot.

  • Integration in progress with FlexDock, InfoNode, JIDE, and JDNC component libraries.

We do not build a new sample application because it is far too complex to fit into this appendix. Instead, we explore the sample Petclinic application and explain the core concepts of Spring Rich and its influence on this application's code. Here, we focus only on the stand- alone version of the sample application and leave the client/server version for you to explore.

It is important to realize that even though we have tried to make descriptions as general as possible in this appendix, some details are specific to the version we checked out from CVS. It is likely that by the time this book is published, a lot of these details will have changed and many new features will have been added. Specifically, we are going to cover the following concepts:

Getting Spring Rich: First, we show you how to get the latest version of Spring Rich from CVS.

Compiling Spring Rich: Next, we explain how to compile the source code obtained from CVS and how to build the Petclinic sample application.

Exploring the Spring Rich architecture: We examine the core components of the Spring Rich framework and explain their usage in the Petclinic sample application.



Pro Spring
Pro Spring
ISBN: 1590594614
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 189

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