Rich Client Programming: Plugging into the NetBeans Platform

Chapter NineNodes, Explorer Views, Actions, and Presenters

Most applications have one or more data models they need to present to the user. There are common controls in all UI toolkits to display data structures to the user. In the case of Swing, JLists and JTrees are two such controls. Yet working with these can be somewhat tiresome—there are a lot of lowlevel details, such as cell renderers, to master. Moreover, switching from using a list to using a tree involves a lot of rewriting. In a plain Swing application, different data models with different kinds of objects in them will each need their own code to handle selection changes, double-clicking, showing popup menus, etc. So, in plain Swing, for each tree or list you want to use, there is ...