NetBeans IDE 6.0 user interface design

Beans Binding, Swing application Framework, and other features you want to implement in the IDE

The most frequently talked-about and innovative feature since NetBeans 5.0 is Project Matisse or Form Editor. Many people believe that Matisse is the best user interface designer in different IDE products and technologies. As a result, many developers are starting to use NetBeans.

For software, innovation and development will never end. As you'll see in this article, many of the new Matisse features in NetBeans 6.0 help improve the development of Swing applications.

Beans Binding and Swing application Framework

In the context of building applications based on the latest JCP specification Beans Binding (JSR 295) and Swing application Framework (JSR 296), NetBeans 6.0 provides some handy features for desktop developers; they will also come from higher Benefits in the development of effective. The average swing application developer will get a big benefit from the swing application Framework improvements in NetBeans, but the platform developers are not getting nothing. A Swing based application framework has been built in NetBeans Platform, offering more features than JSR 296. However, Beans Binding support provides a greater benefit.

Beans Binding Support

Beans Binding eliminates the tedious task of replicating data between user interface components and data classes or JavaBean. With the new Beans Binding improvements, you can access the Bind context menu item by right-clicking the UI element. For example, selecting this menu item for a Javax.swing.JTextField displays the preferred binding property text (see Figure 1). Other properties can be accessed through the Binding tab of the property inspector (Figure 2).

Figure 1. Beans Binding menu item

Figure 2. Set Beans Binding options for JTextField

After you select the property to bind, a dialog box appears, where you can select the target JavaBean. You can then enter an expression that uses the Beans Binding Expression Language. The syntax of this language is very similar to that of JSP EL. In addition to manual input expressions, you can use a selector (which is accessed in the form of a drop-down list or combo box access) to quickly build an expression by expanding properties and child properties.

When you run an application, it updates its binding components when the selected UI component loses focus or when the user presses ENTER. The point is that developers no longer write large amounts of event-handling code to manage this and other operations.