It’s no secret that developing great GUI for Java Desktop applications has always been a challenge. Your business logic might be the most astute for any specified requirement but we all know the paying client first and foremost judges your product quality from his perception of how professional your UI looks. In fact if there is a competition, you would most likely be passed up for the other guy based on nothing else than the “fanciness” of his UI.

Even on this Nairaland forum, the regularity at which fellow Nigerian software developers berate themselves compared to foreign developers - based on little else than “Better UI” - is interesting.

And would you blame them? I know I can’t. I would do exactly the same if I were in there shoes. I’m not the one that is going to buy that rickety looking jalopy instead of a sleek BMW simply because it’s “made in Nigeria”.

So this is introducing the “Designer-Developer Workflow (D-DW)” for rapid, expressive UI development in Java. It’s a technology and methodology that enables the separation of the UI development from the business logic of a software project. A professional Graphics Designer (Using his favorite graphics tools) can handle the UI of your software permitting you, the Developer to concentrate on the logic. This approach to D-DW was developed for the new JavaFX 2 UI library/technology based on the D-DW pattern of the now discontinued JavaFX 1 UI technology.

We are organizing tutorials nicknamed “CodeLabs” where we would demonstrate and walk interested participants through the utilization and application of the D-DW using sample application UIs. For more information, registration of interest etc, click the link below to download our live e-Brochure.

http://74.50.61.88:8080/TMS_Server-war/resources/jnlp/cl_client.jnlp

To run the e-Brochure, you would need the latest Java 7u4 Runtime which includes JavaFX 2.1 Runtime available at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html.

The following are screenshots of the sample applications we would be building in the CodeLabs sessions and links for you to try them out.

[img]http://74.50.61.88:8080/apps/codelabs/samples/SimpleLogIn.png[/img]
http://74.50.61.88:8080/apps/codelabs/samples/SampleApp.jar

[img]http://74.50.61.88:8080/apps/codelabs/samples/FancyPlayer_novid.png[/img]
http://74.50.61.88:8080/apps/codelabs/samples/FancyPlayer.jar

[img]http://74.50.61.88:8080/apps/codelabs/samples/InventoryMgr_Samp.png[/img]
http://74.50.61.88:8080/apps/codelabs/samples/ShopInventory.jar

[img]http://74.50.61.88:8080/apps/codelabs/samples/SimpleLogIn2.png[/img]
http://74.50.61.88:8080/apps/codelabs/samples/CnQ_SimpleLogin.jar

sounds good!