Better Swing through dynamic JVM languages...

The holy grail (?) - applying lessons learned in Web App development to Swing/desktop development. We have Python, Ruby, Groovy and now Scala on the JVM. Shouldn't they bring something to the party in terms of making my life easier to make Swing apps - which is still very tedious.

A couple good news items on this front-
Griffon for Groovy - This project shows some great promise! I hadn't been a big Groovy fan mostly because if it looks so much like Java, why not use Java? But then I realize a large impediment to starting up with Python or Ruby or Scala is the learning curve. On closer examination, it seems perhaps Groovy gets the benefits of a dynamic language while still in the overall "framework" of Java. That would be nice. One might say, 'but without the "buzz" it won't get the vast libraries of Python' - true, except for the extent to which it can just use the vast array of Java libraries. Is there an impedance mismatch? Don't know.

Monkeybars for JRuby - I just came across this project yesterday. (See http://groups.google.com/group/monkeybars) It seems to have a lot of the right objectives. The interesting thing is that there is no Ruby API for Swing components - you do the actual Swing components in a Java class and the Ruby code introspects the bytecode to manipulate stuff. Well, plausible I guess.

But interestingly, I've still not come across any Python-Swing or Scala-Swing toolkit/frameworks.

Singletons gone bad - again

I've been successful at using the swing framework, org.jdesktop.application classes in particular. I have a handful of applications sharing a rather large code base. Now however, of course we want to launch application B from application A. It actually works, but the problem is now that the Application singleton became B instead of A and when the objects in the A application go to use their resource map or action map, the get application B which of course isn't an A, so ClassCastException results. Ugh.

Option A: don't use ResourceMap and ActionMap.
I've already headed in this direction because of NetBeans' issues around keeping track of which class is the true application when it is generating code - so that wouldn't be all bad.

Option B: create one master application perhaps deriving from a new class MultipleFrameApplication extended from SingleFrameApplication. It would know how to create a new JFrame, etc. Arguments could be passed in to specify which "real" application to run - which in this case would mean which view to show first.

Option C: pass application A to the new view for application B. But somewhere we need a new JFrame, etc.

I have a related issue in that my model and helper (controller?) classes have common base classes and the models are singletons. So when application B launches, I'm not sure I want a whole new B model which would replicate the base classes of model A.

Hmm...