Professional Java User Interfaces

Chapter 4. Recurring User Interface Designs

This chapter illustrates some common GUI designs. We will present them in a practical way, sometimes sacrificing exactness and completeness for practical utility and intuitiveness. The idea is to make you aware of some common issues, together with their possible solutions, that have been developed and refined over recent years. Unfortunately, user interface design is a human-dependent task, and it doesn't make sense to constraint it in precise, formal rules.

Following the multidisciplinary approach of this book, we will see both GUI design and development issues together, often switching between the designer's and the implementer's viewpoints. We discuss both Sun's Java Look & Feel design guidelines, as available for Swing applications, and IBM-backed Eclipse GUI design guidelines, as available for SWT applications, although focusing more on the former: we discuss SWT extensively in Chapter 13.

This chapter is organized as follows:

4.1, GUI area organization discusses the issues related to the GUI design of screen areas in the main GUI window.

4.2, Choosers deals with a GUI design strategy that focuses on allowing users to select items and objects.

4.3, Memory components discusses the use of widgets that remember previous user choices and input, to enhance GUI usability.

4.4, Lazy initialization discusses the important approach of instantiating objects only when needed from a GUI design viewpoint.

4.5, Preference dialogs illustrates some typical ...