Thursday January 19, 2006
Thursday January 19, 2006
Matisse in Action!
There's been a lot of praise for Matisse, as well as for this tutorial, by technical writer Talley Mulligan. (What's especially cool about that tutorial are the great flash demos with crisp and concise explanations.) However, one thing I've seen on a few mailing lists is that people want the Matisse-related tutorials and samples to show something real done with the Matisse-designed application. In other words, people don't just want tutorials that show how to make a pretty user interface with Matisse. They also want to see how an application designed with Matisse interacts with, for example, a database. Of course, there's no difference between the end result of an application designed with Matisse and an application designed with any other layout manager—the only difference is during the design phase, where Matisse simplifies life a lot. But anyway, like others on the mailing lists, I'm also someone who prefers complete, functioning applications to a series of user interfaces that don't actually do anything.
So, I've built a very small application that interacts with a Derby database. In fact, it interacts with the MANUFACTURER table, which is in the SAMPLE database that you get when you install the Sun Java System Application Server 8.2, which bundles the Derby database server. (I'd first built the application to use PointBase, but then converted it to Derby, which was as simple as changing the database URL. Nothing more was needed.) Here is the application smoothly and simply designed in Matisse (it's a bit odd that you can't see the jTable, but only the jScrollPane, though):
And here it is in action:
And, if you register the URL to my Update Center (as described here)...
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/resources/geertjan/updates_geertjan.xml
...then you can install the sample in your own IDE:
Note that I used a NetBeans IDE post-5.0 dev build (available from the NetBeans.org download page) to create the plug-in module that installs the sample. Therefore, there might be problems if you install the sample in an earlier version of the IDE. However, I doubt that there'll be problems. Try it out and see for yourself how easily your Matisse-designed desktop applications can interact with a database.
By the way, see this tutorial by Miki Shimizu if you want to understand the database connection stuff used in the sample!
Jan 19 2006, 01:20:11 PM PST Permalink
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