Sunday, September 10, 2006

JList or JTable - I need a multi-column display

I'm gradually coming to grips with programming user interfaces in Java. Read a bit on the MVC (Model View Control) concept and while I see its value, it is a bit too steep a gradient at this point. I am starting off getting the basics of the Swing GUI and have been using Jgoodies with the Jigloo Windows builder. Even that is a bit steep as I want to know how to build these from the ground up and using the drag and drop tools resulted in skipping some of the basics that left me hanging, when trying to modify and customize what Jigloo provide.d

What has helped learn this the fastest has been to work out some simple application that will be useful and then laying out a UML diagram including Use Case for the requirements, Activity Diagrams and Class Diagrams. A programmer is lost in the woods without these design tools. Then I've taken one element at a time, the JDBC database access, pulling up a list and displaying this, etc.

I am up to a point where I need to display a simple list of entries from a database. The list should have 3 columns. I've only been able to get this to work with one column so far. So what I am looking into is whether it would be better to just use the JTable or figure out a "multi-column" JList.

Here are some resources to figure this out:

Code Guru
Java Sun
Dream In Code

And don't forget to use your Study Tech!