Presented on April 16, 2010 at GR8 USA.

1. Porting your legacy
apps to Griffon
James Williams
@ecspike
Software Engineer, BT/Ribbit

2. Goals
•The basics of Griffon
•Griffon tenets
•Respect the EDT's authority
•SwingWorker is your friend
•Embrace simpler layout managers
•MVC does a codebase good
•Go modular
•Deploy, deploy, deploy!

3. What is Griffon?
•desktop framework
•inspired by Grails and the SAF
•leverages Swing and Groovy
•Apache 2 Licensed
•extensible with plugins and addons

4. Griffon Tenets
•Convention over Configuration
•Don't Repeat Yourself
•Pervasive MVC
•Use Data Binding
•Write Good Tests
•Automate Tasks

5. Convention over Configuration

6. Griffon application structure

7. Core commands
•griffon create-app
•griffon run-app
•griffon run-applet
•griffon run-webstart
•griffon package
•griffon list-plugins
•griffon install-plugin

8. Don't Repeat Yourself

9. Would you prefer this ...
public class JavaFrame extends JFrame {
public JavaFrame {
setLayout(new GridLayout(3,1));
setTitle("JavaFrame");
setSize(100,100);
add(new JLabel("One"));
add(new JLabel("Two"));
add(new JLabel("Three"));
}
public static void main(String [] args) {
new JavaFrame().setVisible(true);
}
}

10. ... or this?
def swing = new SwingBuilder()
swing.frame(size:[100,100],
title:'JavaFrame',
layout:new GridLayout(3,1)) {
label('One')
label('Two')
label('Three')
}.show()

11. Griffon Builders
•DSLs for UI components
•allows nesting
•takes parameters as a HashMap
•can be mixed and matched

12. Supported UI toolkits
•Swing/X
•JIDE
•MacWidgetsBuilder
•Flamingo
•SwingXtras
•JavaFX

13. Respect the EDT

14. Respect the EDT
•Event Dispatching thread
•the cause of 94% of speed
problems*
•only UI updates should run on it*
•first-in/first out
•Griffon EDT helpers
•edt
•doOutside/Later/Inside
•withWorker

15. Swingworker
•designed for long tasks
•can periodically update the UI or
notify processes outside the worker
•Swing Worker closures:
•onInit
•work
•publish
•onUpdate
•onDone

16. Embrace simpler layout managers

17. What's the result of having to tweak
the UI of a NB Matisse layout?

18. Pain.

19. MigLayout
•row-column based layout manager
•can replace most layout managers
•uses constraints for positioning
•can do relative positioning

20. MigLayout
import net.miginfocom.swing.MigLayout
application(title:'Griffon Weather', pack:true, size:[700,400], pack:true, locationByPlatform:true, layout:new MigLayout()) {
label("Airport Code:")
textField(id:'tf',columns:5, constraints:'spanx',
actionPerformed: {
controller.getJSON( 'http://ws.geonames.org/weatherIcaoJSON?ICAO=K'+tf.text?.toUpperCase()) })
def createHorizontalBox = { fieldName, boundParam ->
label(fieldName, constraints:"newline")
label(id:fieldName.replace(' ','_')+'Label', foreground: java.awt.Color.BLUE,
text: bind(source:model, sourceProperty:boundParam), constraints:'wrap' )
}
def createHorizontalBoxWithSuffix = { fieldName, boundParam, suffix ->
label(fieldName, constraints:'newline')
label(id:fieldName.replace(' ','_')+'Label', foreground: java.awt.Color.BLUE,
text: bind(source:model, sourceProperty:boundParam, converter:{it + suffix}),
constraints:"wrap, spanx")
}
createHorizontalBox('Station: ', "stationName")
createHorizontalBox('Clouds: ', "clouds")
createHorizontalBoxWithSuffix('Wind Direction: ', "windDirection", " degrees")
//truncated for brevity
}

21. MigLayout

22. Pervasive MVC

23. MVC
•Models
•store data for the MVC Group
•can mark properties as
@Bindable
•Views
•represent a single UI in your app
•can be written in Groovy OR
Java
•Controllers

24. A sample model
import groovy.beans.Bindable
class SampleModel {
@Bindable String name
def age
def location
}

25. A sample view
application(title:'Sample App',
size:[320,480]){
label('Content goes here')
}

26. A sample controller
class SampleController {
//injected by Griffon
def model
def view
void mvcGroupInit(Map args) {
}
/*
def action = {evt = null ->

27. Use Data Binding

28. Binding
•automagically wraps properties
•reduce the amount of code to
update UIs
•can move data in one or both
directions

29. Binding examples
label(text:bind{model.name})
label(text: bind(source:model,
sourceProperty:'name'))
textField(text:
bind(target:model,
targetProperty:'name'))
textField(text:bind(source:model
, sourceProperty:'name',
mutual:true))

30. MVC/Binding Demos

31. Write Good Tests

32. I should be I usually don't. :(

33. Automate Tasks

34. Go Modular

35. Modularity
•plugins - compile-time extensions
•addons - runtime extensions
•~ 50 plugins/addons availiable
•UI frameworks
•Database
•Testing frameworks
•Other JVM languages

36. Deploy, Deploy, Deploy!

37. Deployment
•Deploy to applet, webstart, or
desktop with no code changes*
•Installer plugin for OS specific
pkgs

38. What if you can't move to Griffon?
•JavaBuilders
•http://code.google.com/p/javabuilders
•Guts-Gui
•http://kenai.com/projects/guts
•Netbeans Platform
•http://platform.netbeans.org/

39. Links
Blog: http://jameswilliams.be/blog
Twitter: @ecspike
Griffon: http://griffon.codehaus.org