Glazed Lists on Java Posse #76
I'm a big fan of The Java Posse podcast. It's a weekly audio show that covers all things Java. But beyond the regular news are insightful, fun and concise commentary by some really likeable guys! The show's lead, Dick Wall is a technologist. He tries out a lot of Java-related technologies and has a classic hacker attitude. The other personalities are interesting and distinct: Tor Norbye is all about attention to detail, crafting code as if it were literature. Carl Quinn is an industry veteran who is quite pragmatic. Finally, Joe Nuxoll is fun, high-energy and forward-looking. The show provides an easy way to stay up-to-date in Javaland, plus it puts a bit of personality into my favourite technology.So I was very excited when they started talking about Glazed Lists at 41 minutes into episode #76...
Carl Quinn: So we've had applications of the week, and applets of the week. I thought we should talk about libraries because Java's all about reusability, right? So I just happened to notice this, somebody at work had mentioned this... this library called Glazed Lists. It's open source, you can go we'll have a link to it, you can go grab it. What it is is a way of building models for your MVC UI that do a lot of the work for you. And they also help you adapt it to Swing or SWT, either way. So you can write your model once and run, build a UI for both distribution platforms if you want.
Joe Nuxoll: We actually spent a lot of time, talking to the folks from Glazed Lists and looking at their stuff when we were designing the databinding API in the Swing desktop group. If you go to the Swing Labs, the Java desktop there's the databinding project that was part of JDNC and we did several iterations on that. This Glazed Lists is really subclasses of the Collection API that throws events when things get added or removed so they look like models. And that was an approach that a lot of people really liked. And we were trying to see if we could adapt an approach like that to work on the web tier or the desktop tier or even the mobile tier. So there's was a lot of looking at that sort of stuff. It's a good library, it's very popular too.
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