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Advanced GUI Design

 
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I have read almost every single post in this forum, but have yet to find any information that would assist me in designing and coding an excellent GUI that is aesthetically appealing. In other words, I'm not referring to utilizing patterns in GUI design, such as MVC, but rather to utilizing insets, padding, metal themes, etc. in designing an elegant GUI that follows all HCI conventions. I've looked at the Java L&F guidelines, and many other guides on the internet but have not found what I'm looking for.
Basically, I want to design and code a GUI that is as good as the ones used in JBuilder5 or Together ControlCenter 5.x. Does anybody know how I can accomplish this?
 
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My guess is that a huge amount of work went into the Together
and JBuilder GUI. I would further guess that a not-insignificant
amount of custom coding went into those GUIs, and finally that
the people coding them were top notch, elite Swing developers.
I think achieving that degree of quality would be ambitious
for a production system and would require everything from
great programming to graphic design. For the developer
certification, don't even go there!

 
Tarun Sukhani
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This endeavor is not merely intended for this project; in fact, it's not intended solely for this project at all. I want to be able to reuse the existing code base to build other applications that I'll need for other projects in my programming career.
I doubt any of these elite Swing developers would volunteer any information, given the present-day business environments, but if any of you have ideas as to how I could implement some of the features of these GUIs, I would appreciate it.
 
vladimir levin
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I took a look at the JBuilder GUI just now. It has some
tabbed views, tree controls, scrollpanes, and some toolbars
with graphical icons. All these things are supported within
the standard Swing set of widgets... So maybe I good exercise
would be to try to reproduce the main screen of JBuilder
(without any functionality). As for the text editor, that's
a very advanced control to write. Swing does have a basic
HTML viewer/editor built in, but that's about it.
One piece of advice: I would separate your goals for
developer certification from your other goals to start
putting together a professional-caliber development
framework. I think adding too much sophistication to
the developer assignment would obscure the point of
the assignment, which is that you understand basic
programming fundamentals.
Vlad
 
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