Professional Java User Interfaces

Chapter 1. Putting GUI Development into Context

This chapter provides a comprehensive introduction to the design and development of Java applications with non-trivial user interfaces. After introducing a general-purpose reference model that will guide our discussion in the remainder of the book, we introduce the organizational aspects related to UI development, discussing the role of people in the entire software lifecycle process for GUI software. We then consider the issue of early design, where we briefly introduce the delicate and often overlooked transition from analysis to UI design. A section is devoted to some interesting lifecycle models and the way they support the process of building professional user interfaces. The chapter concludes with a minimal introduction to some useful UML notation that will be used throughout the book.

The chapter is structured as follows:

1.1, Introduction briefly discusses the current state of GUI technologies and the use made of them by developers.

1.2, Focusing on users discusses user-centered design and development throughout the software lifecycle.

1.3, A functional decomposition for user interfaces introduces an abstract model for GUIs that is used throughout the book.

1.4, Tool selection: the Java singularity discusses the selection of a set of ingredient libraries technologies, many of them open source, to speed up GUI development.

1.5, Organizational aspects introduces some of the issues related to the management of the multidisciplinary ...