All Swing components use M/V/C as their basic architecture, but it's somehow difficult to write an application which makes full use the MVC architecture. Nothing problematic with that: for instance, when dealing with forms, a Model/View/presenter approach might be more suitable - and definitly simpler.
The present project shows various approaches to full MVC in Swing, using various libraries. All example correspond to a simple CRUD application, backed by Spring. It's a work in progress, which has a number of shortcomings:
- there is no proper management of asynchronous operation. Currently, everything blocks until the result arrives;
- some cleanup might be useful; for instance, some objects might be injected by Spring instead of being created by hand;
- all data is stored in memory, which might not be reasonnable. To be honest, in the Ramsès Project I have created for the university of Liège, it's exactly what I do for encoders, but it's a relatively specific use case.
Currently, I propose two implementations:
editor-swingfx : uses two different libraries.
- SwingFX, which allows to write Swing applications using JavaFX properties. Some parts are not very well developped, such as text fields processing, or collections;
- regarding collections, I have used GlazedLists (in a very basic way).
editor-jgoodies : uses JGoodies Binding. They cover all your needs. SwingFx is more modern, but doesn't cover all types of components. The problem for JGoodies is that its business model doesn't its support as open-source project - it used to be founded through training sessions and donations by some companies, but the audience for Swing is now too small to support it.
Globally, the idea for both projects is the same.
A shared model contains the lists of data to display ; the program is split into three elements :
- a global list display, which also allows the deletion of items;
- a form for creating items;
- a form for editing and navigating between items.
Each of these forms has a Controller and is bound to a specific ViewModel, which is itself linked to the shared model.
In each form, every element is bound to an element of the ViewModel ; the properties of some elements, such as button activation, are also bound to boolean properties of the ViewModel.
Note that we could also consider using Action objects. Logically, they could fit in the ViewModel. A problem is that an action might also use graphical elements (for instance a file selector), which would be architecturally unsound if it was in the ViewModel. In this case, the solution would be to abstract the said graphical element with an interface, but it would be a bit awkward.
The combination of RxJava and RxSwing provides a possible solution for full MVC applications in Swing. This track has been thoroughly explored by Peti Koch in the project Java MVVM with Swing, RxJava and RxSwing, with pretty complex use cases (multiple concurrent tasks). M. Koch warns DON'T use it in production, there are some open issues here.
Obviously, most of this is a bit old fashioned.