Feb 2006 Meeting Notes

Presentation

• Chad presented on Spring on Swing his introduction to building a Swing application using Swing http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/edu/j-dw-java-springswing-i.html
  • This application was a simple ToDo application with a Swing front-end
  • How does this compare to Swixml
  • Is there a plugin for Eclipse that will allow you to inspect members of java objects from inside a Spring configuration (or even more general, any xml file)? Noone was sure if one existed, although Duffy mentioned something similar in the Hibernate plugin.
    • SpringIDE Plugin - this does apparently do code completion http://springide.org/project/wiki/BeansXmlEditor
    • Hibernate plugin http://www.hibernate.org/255.html
  • Tim brought up a point - How far should you decouple your swing objects? At what level of granularity?
    • Chad believes that you should go as far as possible in decoupling (ie - all the way down to what would be inner classes like listeners)
    • The observer pattern was demonstrated in the application
    • Tim does think that since listeners are glue-type code that they should be placed under Spring's control
    • AddNewButtonActionListener and DeleteButtonActionListener classes showcase this idea of glue-code

Discussion

• Tim asked if anyone had used Matisse from the new NetBeans? [
• Tim commented on nice things from Spring on Swing
  • Wiring - good
  • XML files - bad, ugly
  • This is the same for Swix and Thinlet
  • Ideally you would have a tool that would create the XML for you

Continuing the JUG future discussion

• Is growth a goal?
  • Tim thinks that we need to stay in survival mode
  • Why have our numbers gone down so much?
  • Some people have moved, what happened to the AMO guys (some of them became managers and are no longer coding)
• Moving the server to a new piece of hardware
• What about associating with the Tucson Computer Society?
  • Tom, Warner, and TR are definitely against doing this
  • Tim thinks that becoming a SIG would give us access to facilities and structure
  • What about developing a relationship with the University
    • We would need to be a real organization in order to do that
    • We need a mission statement
    • What about becoming a Non-Profit?

New President

TR was elected at the meeting last night.