Professional Java User Interfaces

Chapter 14. The Personal Portfolio Application

In this chapter we will look at a complete application that covers all the important issues in professional GUI design and subsequent development – or, better, two distinct designs and implementations that solve the same needs. The application has been developed from scratch for this chapter. Although the scenario for which it is designed is totally fictional, it was chosen for its resemblance to real-world situations, especially in the common problems it addresses. The demo applications are available for download together with the source code for the book. The scenario is introduced with the first implementation: an alternative approach is discussed later in the chapter.

The scenario

A publisher of scientific and technical material maintains a large document repository that is constantly growing with the addition of new documents from disparate authors – books, scientific papers, conference proceedings, technical articles, and so on. The repository is accessed by subscription via a Web interface, and is known as the Personal Portfolio application.

One category of users find the GUI rather poor. Librarians, who use the repository intensively, as well as editors and other frequent users, are unhappy with the current browser-based interface, in that it offers limited functionality, and performing advanced and repetitive searches on the repository is extremely time-consuming. Furthermore, the publishers are considering launching new advanced ...