Spring: A Developer's Notebook

Chapter 9. Building Rich Clients

I love kayaks. I usually leave canoes to those who prefer them. In that spirit, we leave rich clients to Keith Donald, the founder of the Spring Rich project, for the content and examples in this chapter..

Getting Started

In this section, you'll start creating a rich client RentABike with an emerging project built directly on the Spring Framework, the Spring Rich Client Project (Spring Rich). The first thing you'll do is get the necessary project files. You'll then see how to get a basic application shell with a splash screen up and running.

But first, a brief background on the aims of the project At its core, Spring Rich is a framework for constructing high-quality, professional Swing-powered desktop applications. It serves several important needs:

Simplification

Swing is the most complete Java widget toolkit today, but it's complex and cumbersome. Spring Rich provides a simpler programming model that's easy to leverage and extend.

Consistency

Low-level Swing provides no guidelines for constructing consistently well-layered enterprise applications. Through Spring, you get effective J2EE services integration and configuration with a consistent programming model.

Integration

Spring Rich integrates the best features of projects like JGoodies, JDNC, JDIC, Webstart, Glazed Lists, Spin, Foxtrot, JIDE, InfoNode, and FlexDock (to name a few), in order to provide a end-to-end platform for rich client development.

How do I do that?

You first want to get the Spring ...