Too often, Swing applications are slow, ugly, and hard-to-maintain. It turns out that it doesn't have to be this way. Swing can be used to create highly-responsive, beautiful applications that are very maintainable. If this isn't consistent with your own experience, don't feel bad; its not very obvious how to make Swing sing.

In this session, I explore three topics that lead to much better Swing applications:

• Proper Swing threading
• High-quality third-party Swing look-and-feels
• Good practices for coding Swing applications

In the threading portion of the session, I explain Swing's event handling architecture and its implications for Swing applications. Understanding this topic is crucial to creating highly-responsive Swing apps. I demonstrate how to use this knowledge in the form of many live-coded examples, and I show how frameworks like SwingWorker and FoxTrot can make this easier. Java's default look-and-feel, Metal, is awful (and in my opinion, the "Ocean" theme in JDK 5.0 doesn't do enough to improve it); you should stop using it immediately. But creating good-looking applications is sadly more than slapping in a look-and-feel; you must also take care to understand the principles behind attractive layouts. I spend the second part of this session exploring how to make your Swing applications look great through a combination of third-party look-and-feels and layout techniques.

Application developers often spend hours on the simple tasks of laying out a form, wiring components to objects, and validating the data entered. This is time that could be much better spend on the business problems your application is trying to solve. This session will show how to leverage open source libraries to take the work out of the form building process.

First you will be introduced to the JGoodies Binding and Validation libraries. Then you will see how a basic form builder built on top of these technologies can reduce the form building process from hours to minutes.

Rich client application development using Java can be intimidating giving the vast flexibility in application design and structure. It also can be frustrating to create the large number of support services (persistence, menus, event and job frameworks) that a large scale rich client applications needs. The Eclipse Rich Client Platform is one project attempting to solve these issues by providing a core infrastructure that not only provides the day to day services a rich client application developer needs, but also providing a suggested path to guide you down the road of designing your application. This presentation introduces both the Eclipse RCP and the tools provided by the Eclipse IDE that assist developers in writing RCP apps.

Rich client application development using Java can be intimidating giving the vast flexibility in application design and structure. It also can be frustrating to create the large number of support services (persistence, menus, event and job frameworks) that a large scale rich client applications needs. The Eclipse Rich Client Platform is one project attempting to solve these issues by providing a core infrastructure that not only provides the day to day services a rich client application developer needs, but also providing a suggested path to guide you down the road of designing your application. This presentation introduces both the Eclipse RCP and the tools provided by the Eclipse IDE that assist developers in writing RCP apps.

How can a RCP Framework help my application? Menus Events Jobs etc.. Introducing Eclipse RCP The base of the Eclipse IDE Actively Developed Leveraged By Many Projects ... Eclipse RCP Services Plugins Core based on OSGi Extensions Menus/Toolbars/Actions Jobs View Framework Tools Support Plugin Editors Product Definition ... Deployment One Click Webstart Deployment Support Multiple Platforms