Friday Fun Component VIII

And it's friday again...yippeah...
This week i was on a trip to a customer in Grenoble (which is by the way a really nice place to be). It was related to my job and i did an installation and training for a customer.
The really best part of that trip was not the installation but my visit at the Canoo headquarter in Basel (CH). This company created a real nice product named Canoo RIA Suite which is based on ULC (UltraLightClient). If you never heard of it you should definitly take a look at it, it's worth the time.
I was there to visit Andres Almiray (Blog, Twitter) and gave a little presentation (which was a little chaotic because i was not really good prepared). During this presentation i figured out that people are interested in a little application that i wrote nearly 2 years ago for a talk at our local JUG.


Here is a little screenshot of the application...

The application itself should not demonstrate how to create a good looking user interface but more it should show the possibilities that you have with good old legacy Java Swing. The icing on the cake was the panel with the bubbles on top of the window because i used this panel as a validator for the whole form.
Well there's not much to explain...just 2 simple questions...

• Do a form always have to look ugly and boring ??? 

• And do have validators always have to look ugly too ???

I think you will be smart enough to give yourself the right answer...


After leaving Canoo i thought it might be interesting for others too and decided to split the BubblePanel of the old project and create a little component out of it that you could now download and use for yourself.
But before i will give you the link to the file i will show you a screenshot of what you will get...

And to get an even better impression of it you might want to see it live before you download the source...right...


So here is as a webstart app...and here is the source...as always a Netbeans project. The interesting part of the source is the BubblePanel, which simply extends a JPanel and produces bubbles in the background until you call setValidated(true). That means you could use it as a normal Swing container.


The main idea behind this bubble thing was to find other ways of visualization. In the original app the panel stays just on top of the form and does nothing but producing bubbles until one completes the form. So don't take the bubbles too serious but i hope i opened a door so you just have to make the next step and think different...


That's it for today, i hope you got the idea...and as always...keep coding...