Looking at Java Swing GUI frameworks

I’ve been poking around today to see if I could find good, general code that glues together Java GUIs. One of the first things I found was Java For U.com, which has a nice directory of a whole bunch of Java packages. It’s basically just someone’s bookmarks file, but it’s a good collection of bookmarks!

I came across the Explicit Layout Manager, which sounds like it warrants further investigation. I’ve been using the JGoodies Forms layout manager, and that’s pretty nice.

Werx is a Swing framework that uses a message bus to separate the front end from the back end. The nice thing about this model is that the framework automatically smooths out the Swing “freezing” problem for long running commands. LGPL.

ObjectScript appears to have a nicely constructed GUI framework as part of its IDE, Chimera. Unfortunately, Chimera is released under the GPL (the ObjectScript compiler is LGPL).

Wotonomy aims to be an open source implementation of WebObjects and JavaClient.