Swing Explorer
Tools in Action Abstract
The presentation covers some common difficulties connected to visual nature of Swing toolkit and provides fast solutions for solving them using Swing Explorer tool developed as open source project https://swingexplorer.dev.java.net.
Imagine you have got a bunch of Swing UI code implemented by some your "nice" former colleague a couple of months ago. Now you boss says that you have to fix some bugs as soon as possible. How to start? How to understand this mess? How to find which component on the screen corresponds to which variable in this badly commented code? So, debugging of Swing application is not always easy because it is visual toolkit and in many cases you can not just write an automated test that checks if your UI looks good, all components have right sizes, all necessary information is visible and painting done correctly.
The presentation will demonstrate you how to use Swing Explorer tool to get fast answers to the following questions: Which component painted this pixel? Where a component was initialized? In which line of code? Does your application access Swing from the correct thread ? How does Swing perform painting step by step? And even more... If you are experienced or beginner in Swing and want to increase your productivity this session is for you. The session is going to present the latest debugging know hows appeared this year.
Speaker
Maxim Zakharenkov (Exigen Services Inc.) has over 10 years of experience in software development and over 7 years of developing Java desktop applications. Currently he leads a development team at Exigen Services Inc. in the projects using Swing, Webstart and remote communications with server side. Maxim is a creator and maintainer of the Swing Explorer tool.
