I recently blogged (on my blogger site) about my quest to find a more effective way of coding Java GUI applications. This resulted in the creation of a one-day workshop that I am very excited about.
The details from the JTraining website are:
Fast-tracking Java GUI Development
This is a great one-day workshop that discusses a number of concerns with developing Graphical User Interfaces applications with Java, and explore various ways to improve the speed and efficiency of development.
- Do you sometimes think that coding in Java is perhaps not the best way of constructing GUIs?
- Do you feel that your team should be able to develop GUI applications much faster?
- Are you frustrated with the amount of “donkey code” you are writing to implement some basic GUI features?
- Are the new team members struggling with the high learning curve of the Java GUI framework you are using?
- Are you spending more time on coding GUI behaviour than you spend on coding domain behaviour?
- Do your team find it difficult to add or modify existing features of a GUI application?
The above questions highlight some of the issues typically found when doing GUI application development. We have been specialising in Java GUI development for more than a decade, and in this time we have investigated and used a wide range of frameworks, tools and techniques to help us build GUI applications more effectively. This workshop explores a number of these options, in a highly interactive and hands-on way.
Visual GUI builder tools, code generators, UI DSLs: these are some of the topics we will investigate.
However, none of these have any meaning if a good foundation of UI development principles and practices is not embraced in a project. The workshop also aims to instil a number of important principles and practices that is a must for any good GUI development team.
I’m also giving away more detail here (I still have to finalize the content and outline, will add that to our website later):
A) discussion of frustrations & issues with “traditional” approach to GUI development using something like RCP/Swing
[interactive discussion]
B) exploration of alternatives:
* Tools (e.g. SWT Designer, Eclipse e4, etc)
* UI DSLs (e.g. Glimmer, Gryphon, XScalaWT)
* Code Generation (e.g. XText, ANTler)
[I want to demo some of the options, and allow for practical hands-on use of at least one. My current idea is that we divide in groups, and each develop a UI DSL, using something like XText, or a more dynamic language like Scala]
C) Discussion of Practices and Principles when doing GUI development, including:
- UI Design
- UI Testing
- Tool (in)dependency
- Domain Driven UIs
[This discussion will also involve a whiteboard/interactive design session (also done in groups).]
And all this will be taking place on 1 July 2010 at my new training and agile office venue in Worcester (or if the group gets to big, we’ll move to an extremely nice country lodge nearby).
