Importing the Swing Set
The Swing set, or JFC, is a set of components developed by JavaSoft, a BulletProof Business Partner, for use by developers. The Swing set extends the standard AWT to provide greater functionality for creating the visual aspect of your applications. By default JDesignerPro includes the necessary components for the Swing set in the Application Builder Object tree. However, before they can be used it is necessary that you either download the Swing set and import it into JDesignerPro or you be running JDesignerPro under a Virtual Machine that contains the Swing set by default.
Downloading the Swing set
To download the Swing set point your browser to the following link:
- http://java.sun.com/products/jfc/index.html
Importing the Swing set
- To import the Swing set you must first unzip the file that you downloaded. This will extract a set of files into the directory of your choice. Amongst those files you will find several jar files. The one we are interested in is swingall.jar.
- Go into the Application Builder of JDesignerPro and click twice on the root icon of the Object tree. You will see a popup menu appear.
- Choose Import Jar File from the menu.
- Shortly you will see the file picker in the right hand panel.
- Use the file picker to locate the swingall.jar file that you just extracted.
- Double-click on the swingall.jar file. A message will appear indicating that the files are being extracted.
- When the process is complete you will be able to click on the plus sign of the Swing Object Group and a few seconds later you will see the icons for the first set of Swing components. If you do not see the icons then the import failed.
- You may notice that each of the icons has a light gray background. This is due to an oversight by JavaSoft when creating the images for the icons. The transparent color was incorrectly set. Fortunately we have adjusted each of the images and provided them for you. All you need to do is copy the files from JDesignerPro\com\sun\java\swing\beanimages into JDesignerPro\com\sun\java\swing\beaninfo\images replacing the invalid images and then restart JDesignerPro.
- You have now successfully imported the Swing set.
- You may also notice that it takes several seconds to show the Swing icons in the Object tree the first time. This is because each of the classes beaninfo must be retrieved before the icon can be determined. This process make take considerably longer when running JDP through a browser.
BulletProof makes no claims to the performance of the Swing set. Where possible we have incorporated our own components to provide the functionality of those found in the Swing set.