DATELINE MARCH 3, 2003
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Easy UI creation and maintainance plus more professional looking interfaces highlights the stable UICompiler release for Java 1.3 and up
March 3, 2003 (The INTERNET). The UICompiler project today announced the immediate release of their integrated User Interface Compiler suite, the first major release of the build environment and framework that allows faster, better looking and simple creation of user interfaces in Java Swing.
"This first stable version of UICompiler features an incredible number of
improvements over basic Java Swing in terms of Swing bugfixes and
maintainability of a project that uses any sort of user interface",
explained Thomas Zander, the UICompiler initiator and release coordinator.
"The Theme provided with UICompiler simply looks stunning and is the first
Theme that supports large fonts for the visually impaired without breaking
the design of the original user interface. Checkboxes get bigger when the
font grows, for example."
"Overall, I think developers will be very, very pleased with the new user
interfaces it allows them to make, in far less time then before.
We found and fixed 27 bugs in Swing via the Theme and widgets we provide, so
the developer has an immidiate gain in using UICompiler for his project."
The provided ant task makes the building and management as easy as possible.
"UICompiler not just looks good, but provides the ability to return a proof of concept in less then an hour where it would have taken days before", added manager and technical adviser Klaasjan Tukker. "This advantage is only amplified by the technology in the fact that the user interface will stay editable in a very high quality graphical designer so changes will take mere minutes where before the programmer would have to start from ground zero."
The project started from a real need to capture the experience with working in Swing and provide a one-stop solution without needing to delve into the problems Swing programmers will eventually walk into. A classic example almost every Swing programmer makes is that a JTable will return the wrong row a user clicked on when a sorter has been added to the table. This and many, many other usability problems have been solved to provide alternatives that are more complete and a lot easier to program, claimes Thomas Zander.
UICompiler uses the files created by Qt Designer
an open source graphical designer origionally meant for the C++ toolkit Qt.
Designer is available for free on all versions of Unix, including Linux,
and can be purchased as part of the Qt framework for Windows. (A free trial
is available)
UICompiler and all its components are available for free
under Open Source licenses, without limiting companies to use the product in
propriatary products.
Overview of downloads
The changelog can be found at: list of changes.
Download and start.
Since UICompiler is free of charge you can download the package from
the downloads page
and then just follow the instructions at the getting started
page.
Besides the valuable and excellent efforts by the UICompiler developers themselves, significant support for UICompiler development has been provided by Microweb Technology N.V..
Trademarks Notices.
Qt is a trademark of Trolltech, Java is a trademark of Sun.
All other trademarks and copyrights referred to in this announcement are
the property of their respective owners.