GUI Development with Java

The model, view and controller are usually tied together with a main program; the part of JabberPoint.java that sets this up is shown in the method JPMain, a “Constructor” in Listing 3.

MVC can be more complex than this, although we've covered the basics here. For an extremely powerful (and wonderful) example, see the JFC/Swing components JTable and TableDataModel. In fact, we'll use these in our simple UNIX Administration Tool.

Here we present a simple example of a Linux/UNIX administration tool, a program for viewing password and group file information. It may seem strange to write system-specific administration tools in a portable language—this tool will work on most UNIX variants. And anyway, Java is a nice language to write in, and the JFC GUI components bring the creation of powerful tools to a wider audience. In particular, this tool will let us showcase the JTable widget, which provides most of the screen functionality of a spreadsheet, including dynamically-arrangeable columns and other nice options.

Since Java is portable, it doesn't provide an API for reading the system password file. We designed and wrote a class PW that has the same public members as the C-language structure returned by the system password resolvers. We also provide a “PWReader” class to read them and provide a sample implementation that just reads from a traditional format password file. This is not suitable for production use on most systems, but serves as a simple demonstration. Since these readers don't affect the GUI, we won't discuss them in detail here, but the code for both is on-line.

Since we want this to be a “good” application and maybe the basis for a general UNIX user database editor (read, write, validate) later on, we'll design it according to the model-view-controller paradigm from the start. I called this program Ued, originally in tribute to a much older program written at the University of Toronto around 1982 and maintained for a time by my colleague Geoffrey Collyer. My program has no code in common with that older ued. The class UedModel (see UedModel.java) is the user data portion of the program. UedView displays a list of users or groups on the screen. UedControl responds to user requests to modify the data. The main thing to note is the look-and-feel it presents (see Figure 5).

Figure 5. Ued Screenshot

Note that you can drag columns around. If we wanted the user to be able to sort by user ID, for example, we'd have our sort routine interrogate the “table model” to see the current column order and use that for sorting. You can select a column by clicking on its title. (This feature isn't used here, but would be in a spreadsheet.) Or you can select all the fields in a row (one user) by clicking anywhere. This would be used in a menu-based “Delete” operator, for example.

How does the data get into the table? The nice thing about JTable is that it specifies a helper class called a JTableModel, which is the interface between your data model and the JTable. Once we have a data model based on PW objects as described above, the JTableModel need only obtain the individual fields for the table and return them to the JTable upon request. See source file UedTableModel.java, which is only about 40 lines long, most of it is just a switch statement. Again, JFC's object model makes code development easy.

Note also that the main program is in a tabbed layout. Group and Properties tabs are also present and not yet implemented, but they do show how easy it is to use the JTabLayout. We just write:

JTabbedPane mainPane = new JTabbedPane();
 add tabbed pane to Frame
cp.add(BorderLayout.CENTER, mainPane);
 add user view to tab
mainPane.addTab("Users", uv);
mainPane.addTab("Groups",
 new JLabel("Not Written Yet", JLabel.CENTER));
mainPane.addTab("Properties",
 new JLabel("Not Written Yet", JLabel.CENTER));

From then on, management of the tab view is automatic—when the user clicks on a tab, its content is brought to the fore and displayed.

The neat thing about JTable/JTableModel is that you can easily make any table editable just by following these three steps:

That's all you need, although in a real application you would also do some error checking and set a “save needed” flag. The password editor in the Ued program does this. In effect, the JTable widget gives you almost all of the user interface portion of a spreadsheet, and it is just one of the many great widgets included in the Swing Set of JFC. And that's just one piece of the new functionality included in Java 1.2.