Swing Hacks

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Chapter 8, Rendering

#64 Turn the Spotlight on Swing

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The Metaphor

If you have ever been to a comic show, to the theatre, or to the circus,

you’ve probably noticed how spotlights are used to move your focus to a

particular location on the stage. A search operation can be compared to a

theatre stage, where actors have been replaced by search results. You just

need to get the user to focus on the right location.

Take a look at an example application, shown in Figure 8-12, which dis-

plays a predefined set of books and lets you search for one or more of them

by entering a search query in the text field at the bottom of the window.

Since the application is just a demo, you can only enter one of the following

queries: books, sci-fi, adams, and pratchett. Each query, when validated by

the Enter key, will find the related books and spotlight them, as shown in

Figure 8-13.

Figure 8-11. All the problems provoked by mixing Java3D and Swing have been solved

Turn the Spotlight on Swing #64

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Figure 8-12. The bookshelf application must let the user search for books

Figure 8-13. Searching for “sci-fi” highlights Science Fiction books