Zachary A Porter
Zachary A Porter
As I started doing graphics, I was naturally led to using Swing and AWT, I found them deeply unsatisfying. When you use these libraries, you lose control of component positioning because of layout managers and you lose originality because all Swing/AWT components are rendered the same, with both producing bland and similar looking GUIs. In addition, I found that setup was needlessly complicated. So I decided to write my own graphics library and windowing system, built on the AWT graphics primitives.
This never-ending project was started originally for my 8th grade science project, and has been a vital for me to use in any of my Java programs that require menus or complex GUIS. The idea is to provide a default set of components, buttons, textboxes, menus, sliders etc, each with huge amount of control for positioning, scaling, color etc. If the programmer does not like the default content, it is easy to add additional widgets or override the default widget functionality. This tool is not meant to be a copy of Swing or AWT, both of which are interesting windowing systems.
This tool gives a massive amount of power to the developer (me) to simply create whatever GUI I see is best for whatever application I am developing. A side benefit is that I can get an active windowing system up and running in less than 10 lines of code.
I do hope to one day release this as an open source product.
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Source Code