April 15, 2008

We are pleased to announce the official release of the JIDE Desktop Application Framework (JDAF), version 2.0. If you've been waiting for the kinks to iron out before jumping into JDAF, we encourage you to give it a try!

JIDE Desktop Application Framework

JIDE Desktop Application Framework, or JDAF in short, is a ground-breaking platform for developing truly cross-platform desktop applications in Java. Decades of application development experience, extensive R&D into developing trends, and OS Guidelines studies have been engineered into a modern solution that will not only save significant development time and resources, but will bring order, quality and an unprecedented level of OS integration to your desktop projects.

JDAF is based on a powerful "Managed Application" technology which manages the entire application lifecycle, ensuring that you need only focus on application-specific features. JDAF provides out-of-the-box functionality such as a Model-View-Controller architecture for data/view management, unique resource bundle features, robust file handling, and 30+ application-related Actions handling single or multiple documents, editing, and window management. Additionally, with a managed UI your users will experience a native-feeling and intuative application because of our OS Guidelines-driven UI implementing standard dialogs, menus, icons and toolbars. Top it all off with printing and help integration features, and even a console application API, and you have the most powerful yet easy to use desktop application platform available.

For more information, please visit the JDAF product page or the self-guided JDAF tutorial.

NetBeans Plug-In

We are pleased to announce NetBeans users that there is now a JDAF Application Plug-in available. Simply add the http://www.jidesoft.com/netbeans/updates.xml to as a new Update Center in Tools - Plugins - Settings dialog of NetBeans and follow the steps to install JIDE JDAF Application Wizard plugin. It will be available on NetBeans plugin portal shortly. Once you installed it, you can go to the new project wizard to new a JDAF application just like the one for the JSR-296 appllication framework. If you plan to evaluate JIDE or JDAF, there are NetBeans plugins for those two as well.

Database Demo

Besides minor functionality enhancements, general stability and final API adjustments, this version includes a database application demo. It is actually a popular "Address Book Demo" from Sun. We have refactored it to use JDAF. We thought this would be a good example not only of facilitating a DB application, but of both migration and seeing how using JDAF brings a level of robustness to a plain old Java application.

Thanks!

We would like to thank all our early adopters for your valuable input and encouragement during this beta cycle. We have many enhancements and sister products coming, so we can all look forward to an exciting future with this product.

April 8, 2008

We are pleased to announce 2.2.3 release of JIDE component products.

BigDecimal support in JIDE Pivot Grid

JIDE Pivot Grid has received attentions from many customers recently. People realized how useful it is and started to use it to bring some cool data analysis features to their applications. In last release, we improved the performance of pivot table as people use it to load a huge number of rows. In this release, we brought BigDecimal support to pivot grid as they found double data type doesn't provide enough precision in their application. In order to use it, all you need to do is to use BigDecimalSummaryCalculator for the summary calculator.
Thanks lievendoclo who helps us implementing this feature. We would also like to say thanks to a few other active users on the forum such as jeffng, michael.rasschaert, mmdeveloper, mbruni, hbillings, Walter Laan and many others who contributed to JIDE Common Layer and other JIDE products, helped answering other users questions and gave great ideas and suggestions to us to make JIDE better. As we mentioned many times before, we need your help as there is no way we can do everything by ourselves.

CreditCardTextField

This is a new component based LabeledTextField. It allows user to input a credit card number and validate on fly. Once validated, the credit card issuer's logo will be displayed next to it. It supports major six credit card issuers and it also supports masked mode to hide certain digits when the field is out of focus. As we have many customers in the finance industry, we hope you will find this component useful.
There also a few cool new features. For example, CellStyleCustomizer is added to CellStyleTable to make it easier for you to extend CellStyle to add your own style. AbstractComboBox now supports JSpinner as the editor. NumberSpinnerComboBox and DateSpinnerComboBox are two such examples. Please refer to the change log to for all the new features and bug fixes.

Trainings

We understand that learning a new API library such as JIDE is not easy. Nothing is better than having someone who wrote the library to guide you through the learning process and answer the questions you may have face to face. So we plan to schedule a few public training sessions over the next couple of months. To make it easier for you to attend, we plan to hold them in several major metropolitan areas such as San Francisco, San Jose, New York City, Boston, Houston, Chicago and San Diego. There are three course - JIDE Grids and JIDE Pivot Grid, JIDE Docking and Action Framework, and JIDE Desktop Application Framework. Each course will last one day. The cost will be roughly $500 per course and we will accept maximum 10 people per session. If you are interested in any of the course, please contact services@jidesoft.com and mention the course name, the preferred location and the preferred date if any so that we can coordinate. If your company have 5 or more people who would like to be in the training, we can also arrange a private training session. For more details, please refer to the training page.

Yes, We are Hiring!

JIDE has been grown quite rapidly in the past couple of years. Now we have 13 products, over 1000 company customers and several thousands of users. Would you like to join us to make JIDE even better? Right now we have two openings to fill in. If you like Swing and Java, enjoy a fast-paced and challenging working environment, are in or willing to move to the beautiful San Diego in California, please submit your resume and salary history to jobs@jidesoft.com. We will offer a great career growing opportunity and a competitive salary for qualified people.

March 20, 2008

We are pleased to announce JIDE Icon Set – a beautiful stock icon set for your Java/Swing applications.

JIDE Icon Set

Here is the exciting news for all developers who hate being forced to design icons (such as most Java developers here). We release our first stock icon sets with 141 professionally designed icons. This icon set is built by our graphic designers with the cooperation from our developers of JIDE component products. By combining both the artistic talent and the logical thinking talent together, our icon set is designed with developer in mind which makes it extremely easy to use in any software applications, especially for Java applications which all our existing JIDE customers and users are building. It even comes with a jar file that you can put into your class path and start to use those beautiful icons right away. The price for this icon set is at a very affordable $149.99 for the Java version which is roughly $1 per icon. At the same time, we also introduced custom icon design services to meet your need. If you dream to have a consistent user interface with a set of unique icons across all applications in your company, we are right here to help you.

Icon Service Overview: http://www.jidesoft.com/icon/index.html
Icon Preview: http://www.jidesoft.com/icon/preview.htm
Custom Icon Design: http://www.jidesoft.com/icon/design.htm
Icon Set Purchase: http://www.jidesoft.com/store/index.php?cPath=33

JIDE 2.2.2.02 Release

Along with the icon set release, we also have a minor JIDE component product release to support it. JIDE Common Layer added two new classes IconSet and IconSetManager to support the usage of icon set in any Java applications. As JIDE Common Layer is open source, even you are not JIDE component customers, you can still purchase JIDE Icon Set and use it with open source JIDE Common Layer.

In this release, we introduced an easy way to do row or column stripes using CellStyleTable. All you need to do is to call table.setCellStyleProvider(new RowStripeCellStyleProvider()) in this new release. We also copied an idea from Vista where we resize the column to fit the visible rows only when user double clicks on between the table columns on the table header. It is optional. If your table is huge and autoResizeColumn call takes a long time, you may consider this option.

Another exciting news is we added as many as 48 different locales for some properties files. Thanks Mike and his company contributing all those localized properties files. As there are too many properties, we decided to move all the properties files to jide-properties.jar in the this release. If you need localized version, you will need to include jide-properties.jar in your class path.

Please refer to the change log to for all the new features and bug fixes.

February 27, 2008

JIDE Software announces JIDE 2.2.2 release and JDAF 1.2.2 release.

We are pleased to announce another major release JIDE component products as well as JDAF.

NavigableTable and NavigableModel
Similar to the design pattern we did for StyleModel and SpanModel, NavigableModel is yet another model interface which allows user to customize the cell navigation using keyboard and/or mouse. If your user is heavy keyboard user, this model will ease their efforts by skipping unnecessary cells when they press tab key.

PivotDataModel Performance Tuning
JIDE Pivot Grid gets more and more popular. People start to use it to display millions of rows where performance becomes an issue. In this release, we introduced several performance tweaks to make it running more smoothly. For example, we no longer calculate possible values until user clicks on the filter drop down button, we cache hashCode calculation, etc. We also did a benchmark and post the result in JIDE Pivot Grid Developer Guide. Please feel free to do your own benchmark and let us know the result. We promise to make our pivot data calculation engine as fast as possible.

Icons
We would also like to make a pre-announcement of a coming feature. It is not directly related to Swing components but still related to user interface design. As we all know, icons are vital to a nice-looking user interface. We will release our first set of stock icons in about three weeks. It will have a total of 141 professionally designed icons. It is not going to be free but will be at a very affordable $149 per set which is roughly $1 per icon. For Java developers, they will be extremely easy to use as we will integrate it with our IconsFactory class and will also introduce a few other helper classes allowing you to use any icons at any sizes using just one line of code. You can check out more details here. We will also introduce custom icon design services to meet your need.

Deprecated Methods Removed
We finally decided to remove deprecated methods which are there for many past releases. They are quite annoying to many users especially new users as the method names are similar and they don't know which one to choose when using intellisense. For existing customers, there could be compile errors if you are still using those deprecated methods. You need to open JIDE 2.2.1 or JDAF 1.2.1 javadoc of those methods to find out what replacement methods are. But don't worry as most of them are very trivial to fix. If you need any help on this, feel free to let us know.

There also a few cool new features. For example, AutoRepeatButtonUtils will make the button periodically triggering the action listener if user presses and holds mouse button, IconsFactory's createRotatedImage will create a rotate image from an existing image and it works with any degree. Please refer to the change log to for all the new features and bug fixes.

December 17, 2007

JIDE Software introduces JIDE Desktop Application Framework (JDAF) 1.2 beta release.

We are pleased to announce the second major update to JDAF. With over 60 new features and improvements, an updated developers guide and greater stability, you’ll find JDAF even more powerful and easier to use than ever. See the changes here.

Improved MVC
JDAF now supports the notion of primary and secondary DataModels and DataViews. This is controlled by the primary property in the DataModel. If primary is false, the DataModel is considered secondary and is treated outside the normal data cycle. You must add a DataViewHandler for that DataModel type which will allow you can install the DataView anywhere in a window.

Split Application Style
The new SPLIT_APPLICATION_UI GUIApplication style facilitates split panes on all four sides of a JDAF window. These panes can be used for MVC (using a DataViewHandler) or straight Swing Components, such as navigation panes, help views or other static components that need to share the window with the primary DataViews.

Improved Docking Framework Integration
The new DockingApplicationFeature facilitatesfull integration of the JIDE Docking Framework into the JDAF MVC architecture, providing an alternative to conventional usage. There is also improved default handling of layout persistence which will load and save a default layout automatically. See the new DockedTextEditor2 demo.

Improved Windowing
It is sometimes necessary to know when a window opens and closes outside of the DataView architecture. For example; to install custom Components into JDAF managed windows or clean up before a window closes. We have added a new WindowCustomizer for this purpose. Note that if you have code that uses setNewDataOnRun(false) and that uses the Docking Framework, you will want to migrate your code to use the WindowCustomizer. See a migration guide here.

Many More Features…
See the change log to for all the new features, bug fixes, and API changes. Be sure to convert from deprecated methods as they will be removed at release time. We realize this is a large and ambitious product with an extended beta period. Thank you all for being patient and for all your great feedback! And if you haven’t jumped into JDAF, now is a great time! Enjoy!

November 1, 2007

JIDE Software introduces GroupList, DualList and AggregateTable into 2.2.1 release.

GroupList

GroupList is a JList supporting grouping. It allows you to organize a large list of items into different groups. It also support four different layout orientation to best utilize the available space. You can see screenshots here and here.

DualList

DualList is a pane with two JLists and several buttons. User can select items from the list on the left and move them to the list on the right, and vice versa. User can also reorder the items in the right list. It is a simple but very useful component, which was asked by our customers for a long time. We are glad to make it into this release. You can see a screenshot here.

AggregateTable

AggregateTable provides a way to aggregate a table model with duplicated values using TreeTable-like expandable cells and cell spans. Different from TreeTable where you have to rewrite your table model using Row interface, you can use any table model with AggregateTable. Again different from TreeTable where there is only one column that is expandable, AggregateTable allows any number of columns to be expandable. GroupTable is also a table that can aggregate rows. But different from GroupTable which inserts extra rows for group rows, AggregateTable doesn’t add any rows. It keeps the exact number of rows as in the original table model but provides a clearer view of the same data. If needed, AggregateTable can even display summary statistics for the aggregated rows just like pivot grid. It can do that simply because it uses PivotDataModel as the calculation engine. You can see a screenshot here. AggregateTable is part of JIDE Pivot Grid.

October 12, 2007

JIDE Software introduces JIDE Dashboard, BalloonTip into 2.2.0 release, and JDAF 1.1 beta.

JIDE Dashboard

JIDE Dashboard is also known as customizable home page. It allows your users to drag and drop to put any components on it. Imagining your application deals with real time data, there are tons of information you want to show to your users (such as a stock trading or a network device monitor application). There certainly isn’t enough space to show all of the information. It’s also hard to guess what users really want to see. So how about let user choose what to display? That's where you need JIDE Dashboard. Please continue to the product page to see product features and screenshots.

You can run web start demo, scroll to the end of the navigation tree to see a few demos for JIDE Dashboard. The Single Developer License for JIDE Dashboard is $99.99. You can click here to find out more pricing information. JIDE Dashboard is included in JIDE Ultimate Suite. For existing JIDE Ultimate Suite customers, as long as you have valid maintenance, you will receive this new product for free (again). You still need to ask us for a new license key though. For all other customers, if you want to use this product, you can purchase this product separately or upgrade to JIDE Ultimate Suite so that you will get JIDE Dashboard or any future component products we will introduce for free. If you have any questions, please feel free to email sales@jidesoft.com.

BalloonTip

We introduced a new component called BalloonTip to JIDE Components product. As the name indicates, BalloonTip uses a balloon shape popup. It also has a nice perspective or drop shadow. Instead of using boring rectangular tooltips, you can use BalloonTip to display warning or error message, help information, hints to make it more interesting and attractive. Take a look at a screenshot here. I am sure you will find it useful.

JDAF 1.1 and ActivityManager

While Java has always supported a threaded model, threaded behavior is more important than ever in our emerging parallel-processor environments. For desktop developers threading involves notorious challenges like thread management, input blocking, UI interaction and feedback. SwingWorker is a popular solution, JSR 296 Tasks, and various other community solutions abound. But with the lack of a managed architecture few provide a cohesive and readily productive solution. In addition to increased stability, we are proud to release JDAF 1.1 beta with the introduction of the ActivityManager. The ActivityManager makes performing threaded tasks as easy as implementing an Action. Your GUIApplication now has an ActivityManager that provides a context for launching, inspecting, and managing one or more Activity implementations. Launch Activities from Actions or manually to perform all kinds of tasks. Global and Activity-scoped ProgressListeners separate thread logic from EventDispatchThread interaction providing a clean Model-View for your threaded tasks in a Swing-friendly manor. A robust set of ProgressListeners provide powerful OS guidelines-influenced UI blocking and feedback in an automated, integrated, and maintenance free manner. If you've been waiting to get into JDAF, now is the time. This is the last beta release. Updates like this won't be available for free once we go live.

JIDE Feed Reader

JIDE Feed Reader is a component that can subscribe to RSS feeds. You might think RSS feed equals to blog, so why do I need another blog reader?! In fact, RSS feed is used more widely than blogging. We made this product to enable the usage of RSS feed technology in any Swing applications so that you can use it to push product release announcements, critical updates/patches, special messages to your users automatically. Please continue to the product page to see product features and a screenshot.

As I mentioned earlier, JIDE Feed Reader is included in JIDE Ultimate Suite. So good news for all JIDE Ultimate Suite because you can use this new product for free. We didn’t increase the developer license price for the JIDE Ultimate Suite either after adding this product, which is good news for all other people who want to purchase or upgrade to JIDE Ultimate Suite.

A special think to people who created Informa project (Home page, LGPL’ed open source project). JIDE Feed Reader leverages this great RSS library so that we can focus on the UI component side of the implementation.

You can run webstart demo to see a demo of JIDE Feed Reader. The Single Developer License for JIDE Feed Reader is $49.99. You can click here to find out more pricing information. For existing JIDE Ultimate Suite customers, as long as you have a valid maintenance, you will receive this new product for free. You will still need to ask us for a new license key. For all other customers, if you want to use this product, you can purchase this product separately or upgrade to JIDE Ultimate Suite so that you will get JIDE Feed Reader or any future component products we will introduce for free. If you have any questions, please feel free to email sales@jidesoft.com.

Overlayable

We introduced many cool "–able" features in past, such as Searchable, Resizable, Flashable. Just like Searchable to make any component searchable, Resizable to make any component resizable, the Overlayable is to make any component overlaying over another component. With this neat feature, you can do many cool things such as providing a validation error indicator, progress indicator, help message etc. Take a look here, you will see several usages of this feature. What makes it even greater is the Overlayable is part of JIDE Common Layer, which means everybody can use it for free.

Real-time Pivot Grid

JIDE Pivot Grid didn’t support real-time data updating very well. In the other word, if the actual data was changed, you had to call calculate() method manually on PivotDataModel which could be an expensive call if your data size is huge. This situation is improved in this release. Now the JIDE Pivot Grid supports real-time data updating. If the underlying table data is updated (and fires cell updated, row inserted/updated/deleted event), we will listen to those events and update the pivot data incrementally. If you are using pivot table in display some real-time data, you will notice the difference immediately simply calling PivotDataModel#setAutoUpdate(true) to enable this feature.

JIDE Desktop Application Framework

After years of research and development, we are proud to release the JIDE Desktop Application Framework into public beta. JIDE Desktop Application Framework (JDAF) is a foundation for developing truly cross-platform desktop applications in Java. JDAF provides industry first concepts such as a Managed Application UI which provides an OS Guidelines-driven application host. From the developers perspective, the UI is managed, so all you need to do is create content and let the services of the framework manage windows, dialogs, menus, and toolbars. An MVC architecture facilitates UI and Data binding. From the users point of view, they will experience an application that feels native and intuitive on their platform because we've taken the next step in Look and Feel fidelity by addressing the application experience portion of OS guidelines specifications. And like Swing, you get this for free just by using the framework. JDAF also includes a console application API which facilitates making command-line applications a snap. This product also provides us a platform from which to release new and more specialized types of application frameworks and add-ons in the future. You can read the product page for the list of features.

This is a first run beta so we look forward to your valuable feedback! Just keep in mind that, while we believe JDAF is very simple to use, it represents an ambitious technology with some novel features. The Developers Guide is thorough and should help you to understand the product. This documentation has a new format with a table of contents which we hope you will find easy to use. It includes a migration guide at the back as well. We have also prepared a tutorial page to help you quickly get into the basics of the framework. We will be adding on to this page in the future. We have also developed a JDAF Application Wizard that will frame-out application source for you. You can run a web start demo to see the wizard in action.

The Single Developer License for JIDE Desktop Application Framework is $299.99. You can go to the purchase page to find out more pricing information. If you have any questions, please feel free to email sales@jidesoft.com.

 July 2, 2007
JIDE Software introduces JIDE Code Editor in 2.1 release

JIDE Code Editor

After months of development, we are finally getting ready to release JIDE Code Editor to public. JIDE Code Editor is a text editor for source code of computer languages. If you are looking for an editor that can be used to view and edit source code of an existing computer language or a new language you created, this is the right component for you. You can read the product page for the list of features.

Before this public release, we did beta testing among a few customers for about two months. As it is a relatively large component, we have decided to still mark it as beta in this release so that more and more people can try it out and give us feedbacks and suggestions. Hopefully after a couple of release cycles, we will reach the formal release.

You can run web start demo to see the demo of JIDE Code Editor. In addition to the three examples just for JIDE Code Editor, we also used CodeEditor to browse the demo source code in all the demos. You can access it from the options panel of each demo and click on the browse source code button.

The Single Developer License for JIDE Code Editor is $249.99. You can go to the purchase page to find out more pricing information. For existing JIDE Ultimate Suite customers, as long as you have a valid maintenance, you will receive this new product for free. You will still need to ask us for a new license key. For all other customers, if you want to use this product, you can purchase this product separately or upgrade to JIDE Ultimate Suite so that you will get JIDE Code Editor or any future component products we will introduce for free. If you have any questions, please feel free to email sales@jidesoft.com.

What's Next

People have been anxious about JIDE Desktop Application Platform (JDAF) as we announced on DesktopMatters conference that it will available soon. Just so you know, we are making the final touch on it before publicly releasing it. You will hear from us soon.

The other product we are about to release is JIDE RSS Feed Reader. This component allows you to subscribe to any RSS feeds inside your application. We know that weblogs use RSS so you can use this component to read weblogs. But that’s not the reason we make this component. We made this component mainly because we want you to use this component to keep your users updated about your new product releases, security alerts, important patches etc. We will release it in a few weeks as part of 2.2 release. This component will again be included in JIDE Ultimate Suite just like JIDE Code Editor.

JDK Version

As mentioned in the previous newsletter, the 2.1 release is the first release we use JDK5 with target set to 1.5 to compile and generate the jars. If you are still on JDK1.4.2, please find another zip package on the download page which contains the JDK1.4.2 compatible jars. We used Retroweave to generate those jar files.

Open Sourced, Finally!

 After more than a month preparation, we finally open sourced JIDE Common Layer at java.net. For those who heard this name for the first time, JIDE Common Layer is a layer above Java/Swing/AWT. When we first started working on JIDE components, we found many missing or wrongly implemented features in Swing/AWT. So we created such a layer and built all JIDE products on top of the layer. As time goes by, this layer grew into a module with over 100k lines of source code and over 30 components. Since most of the features we provided in this layer are so commonly used and probably should be included in Swing anyway, we decide to open source it so that everyone can use it and contribute to it.

We decided to use dual-license to open source this project. The open source code license we use is GPLv2 with classpath exception. For most open source projects, as long as GPL-compatible, you can choose this license. For all commercial companies including existing paid customers, you can choose the free commercial license which has the same license terms as the current software license we are using except it is free. Please refer to LICENSE file in the project release for more information and FAQ.

Please download the source code of JIDE Common Layer and give it a try today. You can run webstart demo to see the demo of all components that are open sourced. For existing JIDE customers, there is basically no change. The product release will still have jide-common.jar included just like before except you can now find the source code of this jar under src subfolder.

New Features

The main new feature in 2.0 release is GroupTable. If you ever saw Outlook Inbox, you will know what GroupTable is. Please run GroupTableDemo to see it in action. Just so you know, GroupTable feature is still in beta at the moment as there are many features we would like to add to this component because making it final. Another cool feature is FilterableTreeTableModel. It can add filter feature to a TreeTableModel. AutoFitlerTableHeader which is a feature we introduced in last release can now support FilterableTreeTableModel. You can run AutoFilterTreeTableDemo to see a demo for it.

As usual, there are tons of small features in this release. You can read the change log for further information.

JDK Version Survey

In the last newsletter, we asked you to response to a JDK version survey here. The result is about 1/3 people are still using JDK1.4.2. Our interpretation is the actual percentage should be less than 1/3 because many of those who are using JDK5 and 6 probably didn’t cast the vote. However this number is not small enough to ignore. So what we decide to make 2.0.0 release (and its patch) as the last release that is compatible with JDK 1.4.2 on source code level (meaning if you purchased JIDE source code license, you can compile JIDE source code using JDK 1.4.2). From the next 2.1 release, we will start to use new language features from JDK 5 and compile into JDK 5 class files. However we will provide a set of jars in separate download that is compatible with JDK 1.4.2 by using Retroweaver.

More New Features in JIDE Grids

JIDE Grids is obviously one of the most focused products right now. In 1.9.5 release, we introduced several new features into JIDE Grids. The first one is the AutoFilterTableHeader feature. It uses a ComboBox-like component to allow user to set the filter directly from table header. The second feature is table flashing. By leveraging CellStyleTable and StyleModel, we created TableFlashable which enables cell flashing using just a few lines of code. The last feature is the TableComboBox and CheckBoxListComboBox. Both seem to be reasonable addition since we have ListComboBox, TreeComboBox etc. ComboBoxes for quite a while. Please feel free to give the web start demo a try here which includes the updated demos for all the new features.

Please see detailed change log of this new release.

JavaOne

Last but not the least, JavaOne is next week. David Qiao, CTO of JIDE Software will speak in BOF-3603 Build Real-World Applications by Using Swing and JIDE on Wednesday evening at 9:55PM and BOF-3356 Next-Generation UI Elements for Swing Applications on Thursday evening at 9:55PM. We are looking forward to seeing you during those BOF’s.

Open Source Announcement

Yes, we will open source some of our components. People have been asking us to open source for quite a long time but we couldn’t convince ourselves that it was the right thing to do at that time. As we introduced more and more advanced components, we now feel it’s time to open source some of the basic components while keeping more advanced components as commercial. In Desktop Matters conference last month at San Jose, David Qiao, CTO of JIDE Software, announced that we will open source JIDE Common Layer within next month. You can read more about it in his blog. Please stay tune for this exciting news. We will certainly send out a newsletter for this when the open source project is open to public.

A Quick Survey

JDK 6 has been out for a while. We mentioned before that once JDK6 is out, we will stop supporting JDK1.4.2 as we only want to support two JDK versions at the same time. However we are not sure if this is acceptable to our users. Thus we created this survey so that we can see how people feel about it. Please cast your vote. The survey can be found here.

JIDE Pivot Grid

JIDE Software is happy to announce the birth of a new product called JIDE Pivot Grid. JIDE Pivot Grid is a Java/Swing implementation of the famous PivotTable feature as you can find in Microsoft Office Excel as well as many other analytic and OLAP applications. A pivot table enables you to take what seems to be an indecipherable mass of facts and extract any trends and patterns buried in the data. You can organize and summarize your data, perform comparisons, and extract meaningful information that can be invaluable to you and your organization. It’s a very powerful tool and now you finally can use it in your Java application with several lines of code. JIDE Pivot Grid is built on top of the award winning JIDE Grids which provides a solid foundation for table related features in Java/Swing. Please feel free to give the web start demo a try which includes a demo for this new product. For more information about this product, visit the product page.

JIDE Pivot Grid is available for purchase immediately. The unit price for single developer license is only at $149.99 for those who always had JIDE Grids product.

In 1.9.4 release, we also introduce several interesting new features to existing components. CollapsiblePane now supports adding any component to the title pane. There were quite a few users asking for this feature. AbstractComboBox allows you to define the focus lost behavior if the current editing value is not committed – to commit, revert or reset. At the same time, you can also use ValidationResult in JideCellEditor’s ValidationListener to tell JideTable what to do if there is a validation failure – to keep the invalid value and not stop editing, to stop editing and revert to last valid value, or simply stop editing and reset to null. We also introduce SpinnerCellEditor to allow you edit integer value using JSpinner.

Please see detailed change log of this new release.

JideTabbedPane

JideTabbedPane is probably one of the first classes we wrote in JIDE history. That's almost four years ago. We decide to juice it up in this release. We enhanced JideTabbedPane to support 12 tab shapes, 4 color themes and 4 tab resizing policies. Now you can use JideTabbedPane to get a tabbed pane that looks like the one in Eclipse3x, Excel, or even OneNote, which will greatly improve the appearance of your application. In addition, it can support all four tab placements (used to be only top and bottom). We also add support for tab leading and trailing component, which will allow you to add your own component before or after the tab area. Make sure you check out the updated JideTabbedPaneDemo and select various options in the option panel to find out what it can do now. You can find a screenshot here.

Support for GUI Builders

Most JIDE components can be used in GUI builders as many of you already tried. However since there are no BeanInfos, there were glitches here and there when using them. In this release, we included a new jar called jide-beaninfo.jar under lib folder. This jar contains nothing but various BeanInfo classes for JIDE components. If you want to use JIDE components in a GUI builder, please make sure you include this jar in the class path. We have tested it in NetBeans Matisse GUI Builder and JFormDesigner. Without BeanInfo, you have to type a number for buttonStyle property of JideButton which is hard to remember what each value means. With the help of JideButtonBeanInfo, you can choose from a drop down combo box to select a button style such as "ToolBar Style" or "Hyperlink Style" etc. There was also trouble using CollapsiblePane because you could not drop a component onto it. Now you can do it with the help of CollapsiblePaneBeanInfo. Click here to see JIDE components being used in NetBeans Matisse GUI Builder.

Another noteworthy is AbstractComboBox (DateComboBox, ColorComboBox, TreeComboBox etc extend it), IPTextField and LabeledTextField (all the QuickFilterFields extend it) now support baseline, a new feature in JDK 6. So if you use GUI builders that support baseline, you will be able to take advantage of this feature to achieve a better layout. See here for a screenshot where baseline is in use.

Support for Synthetica and GTK LookAndFeel

In this release, we added built-in support for Synthetica L&F. Now you can run your application under Synthetica L&F without any problem. And it looks good too if you choose Xerto style as the extension for JIDE components. See here for a screenshot. JIDE components can also run under GTKLookAndFeel on Linux. Thanks for the UIDefaultsCustomizer and UIDefaultInitializer classes we added to LookAndFeelFactory which made all those possible. You can use those two classes yourself to support any other 3rd LookAndFeels if we don’t support them by default.

Talking about different LookAndFeel, people are also discussing about Vista LookAndFeel in JDK 6 since Windows Vista is about to release. We tried it JIDE demo and it looks just great. You can see several screenshots (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) which are taken using Windows Vista RC1, JDK 6 beta2 and JIDE 1.9.3.

Pivot Grid

As we mentioned in the last newsletter, we were working on a new product called JIDE Pivot Grid. We are happy to announce this new product is available for beta testing. If you are interested in trying it, please email sales@jidesoft.com and ask for it. We are looking forward to seeing you using it and providing valuable feedbacks.

Please see detailed change log of this new release.

OutlookTabbedPane

We had FloorTabbedPane which mimics the Outlook Navigation Pane as in Microsoft Outlook 2000. Outlook 2003 introduced a new design of the navigation pane. The new design greatly improved usability, more flexible and a lot easier to use. That's why we created OutlookTabbedPane to mimic this new design. If you need a main navigation area for your application, this component is definitely an ideal candidate you can try. You can see here for a screenshot.

Calculator and CalculatorComboBox

Calculator is a simple math calculator. The reason we did this component is because it is very useful to input a number that needs calculation. For example, in a stock trading application, you will need a field that can accept dollar amount of a transaction. Most likely user knows the stock trading price and the quality. To get the transaction amount, user has to go to their calculator and calculate price x quality. With CalculatorComboBox, user can type in price directly into the field, then type in "*" followed by quality and press ENTER. The result will be in the field. You can use it as a standalone panel or you can use it as table cell editor. Here is a screenshot.

Please see detailed change log of this new release.

CalendarView and DateChooserPanel with Multiple Selections

We had DateChooserPanel component for a long time. It can allow you to view a one month calendar and select one date at a time. In this release, we added multiple-selection support to DateChooserPanel. In addition, we introduced a new component called CalendarView which allows you to view multiple months at the same time and select multiple dates. You can take a look at screenshot. Need a component that can display all vacation days in the current year? Now you have it.

IPTextField

At first glance, you may think it is possible to implement IP address editor using JFormattedTextField with MaskFormatter, just like the editors for telephone number or social security number. However it is not true because each octet in IP address has to be less than 256. MaskFormatter can't handle this requirement easily. Since there are several customers asking for this component, we decide to make one in this release, using a different approach of course. It is part of JIDE Grids. You can find an example at G23. TextFields\IPTextFieldDemo. Hopefully you will find it useful.

More Options in JIDE Docking Framework

In this release, we added several useful options to give you more control over this powerful dockable window solution. First, you can specify a preferred autohide side on each DockableFrame. With this option, you can limit the side panes to certain side like what Eclipse IDE does. Secondly, there is a new sideDockAllowed option on both DockingManager and DockableFrame. If you set this option to false, user will not be able to create any new tabbed panes except those already exist in default layout. Last but not the least, rearrangable and tabDockAllowed flags are added to DockableFrame. With these two options, you can create a special dockable frame that can be not moved and no other dockable frame can dock to it.

You may not be aware that there are over 40 options on DockingManager and over 30 options on DockableFrame you can customize. Just so you know, even though you may not use .ilayout file to setup your initial layout, you can still use Visual Designer to learn about those options because in Visual Designer you can interactively change the option and see the result immediately.

ImagePreviewList and JideOptionPane

ImagePreviewList is a component that takes a list of ImageIcons and displays them in thumbnail view. JideOptionPane is a better JOptionPane with a better looking interface. One feature worth mentioning is it can support "Detail >>" button. For example, you can use this feature to show a long stack trace. Only when user clicks on the detail button, the stack trace will show up. These two new components are still in beta so feedbacks are welcomed.

Customized Office2003 Themes

Our Office2003 LookAndFeel supports all three standard XP themes as well as the default gray theme. In this release, we introduced a new class called BasicOffice2003Theme. You can pick any color and this theme can use this color as the base color to calculate all other colors that will be used to paint JIDE components. So you can easily create a brand new XP-like theme that distinguishes your application from those using the standard XP themes. Please see SampleVsnet demo for an example of a customized theme.

Polish Translation

Polish translation is in. Thanks Krzysztof Trojan for providing it. So far our library is localized to Germany, French, Polish, Chinese and Japanese. If you are interested in providing any other language translations or you already have them translated, please feel free to send them in and we will integrate into our jars. Please leverage the Localization Helper Forum so that we can coordinate the localization efforts.

Please see detailed change log of this new release.

March 6, 2006
JIDE Software announces 1.9.0 release of JIDE products

In this release, we introduced a brand new product – JIDE Shortcut Editor

JIDE Shortcut Editor

JIDE Shortcut Editor is component that be used to manage shortcut keys (also known as accelerators) for your application. You can see a list of features of this product here. You can also run webstart demo. Shortcut editor is the last item in the demo tree.

This is the first product that falls into what we call special component category. JIDE Components, JIDE Grids and JIDE Dialogs (along with standard Swing components) have laid out a solid foundation for Swing applications. We further expand the foundation by building more special components on top of it. For example, JIDE Shortcut Editor is built on top of JIDE Grids and JIDE Components. We expect to add more special components in the future to fully unleash the power of base components provided by JIDE and Swing.

We priced JIDE Shortcut Editor at $49.99 each for single developer license. For existing customers who have #4680, you are qualified to get this new product for free. So if you want to use it, you just need to let us know and we will generate a new license key for you.

Redesigned Aqua style

This is good news for Mac users. With the help of a couple of JIDE customers (as always), we redesigned the user interface of a few components under Aqua style. More specifically, DockableFrameUI and JideTabbedPaneUI are rewritten this time. Comparing with the old version, dockable frame’s title bar is thinner, like utility windows on Mac OSX. Title bar buttons are redesigned. Gripper for command bar and dockable frame is changed too. JideTabbedPane now has the blue gradient like regular tabbed pane. Please see here for a screenshot. Feel free to let us know any feedbacks.

There are lot of enhancements and bug fixes in this release as well. For example, DateComboBox and DateChooserPanel support time display. A new system property "jide.fontSize" is added to allow you change the font size globally for your application.  

Please see detailed change log of this new release.

December 29, 2005
JIDE Software announces new online store

JIDE Software is happy to announce the opening of a new online payment system. In the past, we used PayPal to handle online credit card payment. Although PayPal was very easy to setup for merchant and easy to use for most users, we also received many complains from our users because of strict policies and credit card limitation posted by PayPal. To improve customer satisfaction and web site usability, we developed this online payment system as front-end and connect to back-end payment gateway Linkpoint which is one of the largest payment gateways.

We take your privacy seriously. For all pages related to credit card submission, we use SSL (Secure Socket Layer) encryption to ensure secure transmission of all the data including your credit card information you have entered in the order form. Please make sure the address line beginning with https://www.jidesoft.com/ before submitting your credit card information. Your credit card information is submitted to payment gateway directly using SSL and we won't store it anywhere on our server.

Nevertheless, for those who already have a PayPal account and are happy with it, you can still use PayPal in this online store. Just to choose PayPal as payment option when you check out.

Click here to enter the online store! And enjoy shopping with JIDE in 2006!

JIDE Software announces the 1.8.6 release. We introduced two brand new components into this release.

FolderChooser

FolderChooser has been in our component candidate list for a long time. We finally get it ready for this release. FolderChooser extends JFileChooser, so you will find it very familiar if you know how to use JFileChooser. FolderChooser allows you to choose a folder in file system. It also has a toolbar to allow you create a new folder or delete existing folder. One special feature about this implementation is that it supports recent visited list combobox to make it easier to go back to a recent selected folder. Please see here for a screenshot.

RangeSlider

JSlider allows you to choose a value using slider interface. However there are cases that we need to choose two values to form a range. Of course you can use two JSliders to do it. A better way is to use a new component we introduced in this release called RangeSlider. RangeSlider extends JSlider. It has two thumbs – a lower thumb to choose the low value, a higher thumb to choose the high value. Each thumb can be dragged independently or simultaneously. Please see here for a screenshot.

Both FolderChooser and RangeSlider are in JIDE common layer. So no matter what products you purchased, you will be able to use these two components for free.

Well, we covered some highlights but that’s not all. There are lot of small enhancements and bug fixes in this release as well. Want to know more about this new release? Please see detailed change log here. If you are existing customers, please continue to customer download page to download 1.8.6 release. For those who purchased source code license, you will receive the corresponding source code package in email within next two days. If you are still evaluating our products, please proceed to download page to run the latest web start demo and download the evaluation package.

This release will probably be the last one in 2005, so we want to stake this chance to say Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all of you. And please stay tune for more existing features we will introduce in 2006. 

October 28, 2005
JIDE Software announces 1.8.5 release

Search like Firefox

Searchable component family welcomes one more component – TextComponentSearchable. This is yet another Searchable after TableSearchable, ListSearchable, ComboBoxSearchable and TreeSearchable. It adds quick search feature to any JTextComponents. By default, the searching text is displayed on a small popup window on top-left corner of the component that is being searched. In this release, we allow you to provide your own SearchableProvider to replace the popup. In fact, we create a new SearchableProvider called SearchableBar. SearchableBar mimics the searching bar in Firefox. Instead of using a small popup window, SearchableBar uses a full-size bar to allow you typing in searching text and configure searching options. If your end users are not computer savvy, SearchableBar should be lot easier for them to handle than the small Searchable popup. Since SearchableBar delegates the actual searching function to Searchable, it can work with any component that has Searchable implemented. In the other words, you can use it in JTable, JList, JTree, and JTextComponent. It is also an ideal candidate to replace the modal find dialog. There is a screenshot here you can take a look.

Sort the TreeTable

We had implemented SortableTableModel, SortableListModel and SortableTreeModel. In this release, we added sorting to TreeTableModel. The sorting of TreeTableModel is a little more complex than other sorting because TreeTableModel represents hierarchical data. For example, sometimes, sorting should apply to root level rows only. At other times it applies to leaf level only. In our SortableTreeTableModel, we allow you to customize the sortable option for each column. There are four options - SORTABLE_NONE, SORTABLE_LEAF_LEVEL, SORTABLE_ROOT_LEVEL, and SORTABLE_ALL_LEVELS. TreeTable now extends SortableTable. So by default, it will be sortable enable unless you call setSortable(false). FileSystemTreeTableDemo example has been modified to show you how to use this new feature.

Heavyweight component support

Integrating with heavyweight component within Swing has always been tricky. However nowadays it seems inevitable because of projects like JDIC, OpenGL and OpenOffice. They depend on heavyweight components. Although there were unofficial tricks on the developer forum to make JIDE Docking Framework supporting heavyweight components, this release will be the first one that officially supports it. We added a new method setHeavyweightComponentEnabled(boolean) to DockingManager, DocumentPane, and JideSplitPane. Set them to true if you plan to use heavyweight components in them. There are more works that need to be done in this area. In coming releases, we will continue perfecting the integration.

See source code while exploring the demos

People love the way we put over 60 demos into one JFrame so that they can easily explore all the features in our library. We have received a lot of kudos on this. To make it even better, we added a “Browse Source Code” button next to the demo. Clicking on it will bring up all source code for that demo. So now you can see the demo and at the same time look at the source code of that demo. SearchableBar comes in at a very good timing. If you press Ctrl-F, you will be able to search through the Java source code and look for the keyword you are interested in, of course, using SearchableBar.

Want to know more? Please see detailed change log. If you are existing customers, please continue to customer download page to download 1.8.5 release. For those who purchased source code license, you will receive the corresponding source code package in email within next two days. If you are still evaluating our products, please proceed to demo page to try the latest web start demos and download the latest evaluation package.

Adding styles to your JLabel

JLabel is probably the simplest component provided by Swing. It’s good to be simple but not so good when there are so many limitations. One big limitation of JLabel is that it can’t even display text in different color, not to mention display underline or strike through line. You might argue JLabel supports HTML code so you can use html code to assign different color to the text. That’s what we thought too. But once we went that path, we were stuck. First of all, performance. Don’t be surprised if I tell you html JLabel is 20+ times slower than plain text JLabel. Secondly there are bugs on this in Swing. When you tried to use default tree cell renderer (which is based on JLabel) with html code, you will encounter bug such as someone reported here. JTextPane, on the other hand, can display text in different styles. But using it in the case of cell renderers is overkill. All we need is something like JLabel but light, fast and can display text in different color along with some simple styles, can we? Here comes the StyledLabel, a new component we introduced in 1.8.4. The design of StyledLabel is very similar to StyledText in SWT. You can take a look at the screenshot to find out what StyledLabel can do. It’s fast - almost as fast as plain text JLabel. It’s much easier to use comparing to JTextPane. It can be used in JTree, JTable or JList as cell renderer. We even create StyledTreeCellRenderer, StyledTableCellRenderer and StyledListCellRenderer to make it easy for you. Please make sure you run the web start demo  and click on StyledLabel demo. If you want to see the example source code, it’s at examples/B15. StyledLabel.

Enhancing JideTable

As we mentioned in JIDE Grids Developer Guide, JideTable is an extended version of JTable. Whatever features we thought should be part of JTable, we put it in JideTable. In this release, we added quite a few new features to JideTable. The most interested feature is non-contiguous cell selection. A lot of you probably were surprised to see Swing’s JTable uses two ListSelectionModels – one for row and the other for column – as the selection model for JTable. As a matter of fact, there is no way to support non-contiguous cell selection in JTable. You can find a bug report here. The bug has been there for 7 years and still opened. We decided to give this problem a try after being asked by a user at here. And here you go. Simply making a call table.setNonContiguousCellSelection(true) on JideTable, you will get a table that supports non-contiguous cell selection as you can see here.

CheckBoxTree

We added CheckBoxList since 1.8.0 release. This release we introduced CheckBoxTree. To be frank, as component provider, we always promote code reuse. So there is no reason we don’t reuse code if possible. Santhosh Kumar, a famous Java/Swing blogger, wrote a very nice CheckBoxTree implementation in his blog. He is kind enough to share his implementation with JIDE. So this CheckBoxTree is actually based on his implementation. This brings up a very interesting point. If you have written some components that are missing in JIDE product line and you are willing to share them with us, please feel free to contact us. On one hand, it’s a good opportunity for you because your code will be used by thousands of JIDE users. On the other hand, you will earn free single developer license (or free upgrade/support if you are already our customer) from us as exchange. We did this kind of exchange before and will continue doing it.

Want to know more? Please see detailed change log. If you are existing customers, please continue to customer download page to download 1.8.4 release. For those who purchased source code license, you will receive the corresponding source code package in email within next two days. If you are still evaluating our products, please proceed to demo page to try the latest web start demos and download the latest evaluation package.

Sortable/Filterable JList and JTree

We had SortableTableModel and FilterableTableModel in JIDE Grids for a while. We also have QuickSearchField. It leverages FilterableTableModel and implements a handy quick filtering feature. However it's not complete yet. Tables can be sorted and filtered, so can the lists and trees. In this release, we introduced SortableListModel and FilterableListModel for list. Given any ListModel, you can wrap it into SortableListModel or FilterableListModel and pass to JList to achieve sorting and filtering feature. For JTree, we have SortableTreeModel and FilterableTreeModel too. Just like the QuickSearchField (we renamed to QuickTableFilterField) which is for filtering in JTable, we also introduced QuickListFilterField and QuickTreeFilterField which can make any JList or JTree filterable using a couple of lines of code. We created four new demos to demonstrate those new features. Please make sure you run webstart demo to see them all.

AutoCompletion and IntelliHints

Auto-completion is usually associated with combo box. An auto-completion combo box will complete the rest for you automatically based on a known list after you type in the first couple of letters. However auto-completion feature is not limited to combo box. In our implementation, it could be any JTextComponent such as JTextField. The "known list" could be more than a list too. As long as it can implement the Searchable interface, it can be the "known list". In B13 example, we will show you how to create an auto-completion text field using the data from JTree or JList or just an array of data.

IntelliHints is a new name we invented to capture a collection of new features we introduce in 1.8.3 release. Similar features are called code completion or intelli-sense in the context of text editor. Without getting into too much detail, I encourage you running B14 example to see different flavors of IntelliHints. IntelliHints is designed to be extended. You can easily extend one of existing base IntelliHints classes such as AbstractIntelliHints or AbstractListIntelliHints or even implement IntelliHints directly to create your own IntelliHints.

Both AutoCompletion and IntelliHints are very useful usability features. If you use them at the right places, it will increase the usability of your application significantly. Just imagining how depending you are on the code-completion feature provided by your Java IDE, why not provide a similar feature to your end users as well? They will appreciate it. With the help of IntelliHints, it's not far away.

More examples for HierarchicalTable

HierarchicalTable is a very useful table component because it allows you to nest any components inside a table. Please notice I said "ANY" component. Many users thought nested component can only be JTable. If you just want to nest JTable, I would consider TreeTable as a better choice for that purpose. To better demonstrate the power of HierarchicalTable, we added a new demo which shows you how to use HierarchicalTable to implement the "Add/Remove Programs" dialog in Window’s Control Panel. We also updated the existing trading demo to show you how to nest multiple components in the same row. After you see these two demos, please let me know if you have a smart idea to use HierarchicalTable in your application.

Want to know more? Please see detailed change log. If you are existing customers, please continue to customer download page to download 1.8.3 release. For those who purchased source code license, you will receive the corresponding source code package in email within next two days. If you are still evaluating our products, please proceed to demo page to try the latest web start demos and download the latest evaluation package.

July 14, 2005
JIDE Software announces 1.8.2 release

How about more tables

JTable has always been an interesting component to work on. There are already a number of table components in JIDE Grids. Some commonly used ones are PropertyTable, SortableTable, and HierarchicalTable. In this release, we introduce three more new table components. They are CellSpanTable, CellStyleTable and TreeTable. You can go to JIDE Grids product page to see several new screenshots about these three new tables.

CellSpanTable allows you to define cell spans in a table. Cell span sometimes is referred as cell merge. When several cells merge together, one cell will cover the area of several cells. With the help of DefaultSpanTableModel and AbstractSpanTableModel, CellSpanTable can support very flexible ways of defining cell spans. You can look at G16 in the examples folder to find out how to use them.

CellStyleTable provides a way to associate styles with a cell. The styles could be things like background, foreground, font, border, and alignments etc. With this feature, you can easily with archive features like row or column stripes, highlight cells containing error or matching searching criterion. Refer to G17 in the examples folder to see how we archive these using CellStyleTable.

TreeTable, as the name indicates, is a combination of tree and table. It is very useful when the data you want to display is hierarchical data. In many ways it is similar to HierarchicalTable. However they also have obvious distinctions. You can refer to JIDE Grids Developer Guide to see a comparison of these two tables. A typical usage of TreeTable is to display file system. G18 in the examples folder is such a demo. PropertyTable, although was introduced before TreeTable, was refactored into a special instance of TreeTable in this release.

A better StatusBar

In this release, we added a few new features to StatusBar. We added ResizeStatusBarItem. It looks like the resizable corner as you can find on Windows. If you added it as the last item on status bar, it clearly indicated the frame is resizable. And yes, it will only paint the resizable corner when the frame is indeed resizable. If frame is not resizable or maximized, it will be blank. In addition, we added StatusBarSeparator between status bar items as well as a shadow border on the top of status bar in OFFICE2003_STYLE. The result, if you run the web start demo under OFFICE2003_STYLE, is that you will get the exact style of a status bar as you see in Microsoft Office 2003.

Want to know more? Please see detailed change log. If you are existing customers, please continue to customer download page to download 1.8.2 release. For those who purchased source code license, you will receive the corresponding source code package in email within next two days. If you are still evaluating our products, please proceed to demo page to try the latest web start demos and download the latest evaluation package.

June 24, 2005
JIDE Software announces 1.8.1 release

It's All about Searching

Many of you still remember the Searchable feature we introduced back in 1.6.2 release. With one line of code you can make data-rich components such as JList, JTree, JTable or JComboBox much easier to use. In this release, we are still crazy about searching so we introduced two more new components related to searching. They are QuickSearchField and QuickFilterPane. If your application has a huge table with thousands of rows, these two new components will make searching and filtering in that huge table a breeze. Click here to see a screenshot of these two new components. Or you can run the web start demo and select QuickFilter demo to see it in action. Is this demo, we created a large song list with over 10000 songs. If you try to use it, you will find how fast and easy it is to find the song you want. (BTW, if you have a larger song list in your iTune, please feel free to export the song list and email us the file. We tried very hard to collect this 10000 song list.)

You must wonder how the performance of these components is. We tried to increase the song list from 10k to 100k, 200k, it still ran very smooth. If we further increased to half to 1 million, it started to slow down, especially QuickSearchField. This is understandable because 1 million is indeed a large number and we simply used String.indexOf() to do the string comparison. As always, our components are extensible and configurable. If you have a better comparison algorithm that works the best in your application, you can override QuickSearchField's compare() method to supply your own algorithm. So we love to see you try it out in your application and let us know how it works.

Both components are part of JIDE Grids product since they depend on FilterableTableModel which is already in JIDE Grids.

Want to know more? Please see detailed change log. If you are existing customers, please continue to customer download page to download 1.8.1 release. For those who purchased source code license, you will receive the corresponding source code package in email within next two days. If you are still evaluating our products, please proceed to demo page to try the latest web start demos and download the latest evaluation package.

JIDE Software announces the 1.8.0 release of all the products. As always, there are a lot of exciting new features in this release.

Visual Designer for JIDE Docking Framework and Action Framework

The most exciting feature is probably the new Visual Designer. Visual Designer allows you to use drag-n-drop to visually design the layout of dockable frames and command bars, and save it as an xml file. In your application, instead of calling setInitXxx method to hard code the initial side, mode and index of each dockable frame, you just call loadInitialLayout to load the layout xml file you created. Both JIDE Docking Framework and JIDE Action Framework now support to load initial layouts. You can web start the Visual Designer at http://www.jidesoft.com/products/download.htm. There is also a Flash demo on the same page called "Create a complex application framework using JIDE in 10 minutes". It will give you a step-by-step tutorial on Visual Designer.

Xerto LookAndFeel

JIDE supports many different LookAndFeels such as Office 2003, Vsnet, Eclipse, Aqua etc. In this release, we introduced a new one call Xerto LookAndFeel. Xerto gets its name from its creator http://www.xerto.com/. They will soon release their first product called Imagery. If you haven’t, you must go to their website and check it out. It’s a wonderful looking application with a very polished LookAndFeel. Not only that, they were generous enough to share the LookAndFeel with us so that all JIDE customers can use it for free. Thanks Jasper for this great looking LookAndFeel!

New Components

We introduced several new components. CheckBoxList is a list that supports JCheckBox as list element. AutoResizingTextArea is a special text area which automatically resizes itself vertically when its content grows. JideScrollPane now supports scroll bar corners. With this enhancement, you can do some cool features of scroll bar as you see in Microsoft Office or Adobe Acrobat.

We also introduced BeanProperty and BeanIntrospector in JIDE Grids to support PropertyTable. This feature will make it very easy to use ProperyTable to display properties of a JavaBean compatible object. As a matter of fact, we used this new feature extensively in Visual Designer.

Anti-Alias Text

We added anti-alias text support for JDK 1.5. If you run with system property swing.aatext=true, all JIDE components will use anti-alias font to draw the text. We just found out yesterday, in JDK 1.6 early access, it supports sub-pixel anti-alias which looks much better than the anti-alias in JDK 1.5. In JIDE 1.8.0 release, we can support it too. You can see a screenshot of it at http://www.jidesoft.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=856.

Forgot to call installJideExtension?

After you used JIDE for a while, you all knew that you should call LookAndFeelFactory.installJideExtension() to add JIDE specific UIDefaults to the UIDefault table before using any JIDE components. However for the first time user, it's not so obvious and has caused a lot of trouble. In 1.8.0 release, we finally solve this issue. Now you don't need to call installJideExtension() explicitly. We will call it automatically when necessary.

Another similar case is you don't need to call ObjectConverterManager.initDefaultConverter(), or CellEditorManager.initDefaultEditor(), or CellRendererManager.initDefaultRenderer() any more. We will call them automatically when we need.

JIDE and Spring RCP integration

There are many customers showing their interesting in JIDE and Spring RCP integration. In fact, a couple of customers successful did it. They shared their results at https://jide-springrcp.dev.java.net/. It’s an open source project so all of you are welcomed to check it out and contribute to it.

Want to know more? Please see detailed change log at http://www.jidesoft.com/history/index.htm. If you are existing customers, please continue to http://www.jidesoft.com/downloads/ to download 1.8.0 release. For those who purchased source code license, you will receive the corresponding source code package in email within next two days. If you are still evaluating our products, please proceed to http://www.jidesoft.com/evaluation to download the latest evaluation package.

March 07, 2005
JIDE Software announces 1.7.0 release

JIDE Software announces the 1.7.0 release of all the products. As always, there are a lot of exciting new features in this release.

New Demo Framework
The most exciting change is probably the new demo framework we introduced. This is not a new product but a new way to organize our demos. With the help of JIDE Docking Framework, JIDE Action Framework, CollapsiblePane(s) and DocumentPane, we integrated all 38 separate demos into one application. You can run the web start demo to see this new demo framework. Or if you use ant to build our demos, just type in “ant ALL” target which will run the demo framework. As we have more and more components, we believe that this demo framework will help users a lot to exploit what components are available in our products.

JIDE Grids
We introduced several new components into JIDE Grids. They are HierarchicalTable, JideTable, TableScrollPane, and TableSplitPane.

HierarchicalTable has been in beta status for several months. A lot of customers are waiting for it. In this release, we finally moved it out of beta. It now separates view from model. It works very well with sortable table which was a problem before. It also can handle large table without getting into memory issue as it allows you to reuse and/or dispose child components if collapsed. If you used beta version of this component, JIDE Grids Developer Guide has detail document telling you how to migrate to this new version.

JideTable is an extended version of JTable. It adds support for cell editor listener (before cell editing starts and before cell editing stops etc), validation, automatically resize row height to match with cell contents and nested table column header. TableScrollPane is built on top of JideScrollPane, another new component where we added support for column footer and row footer. With TableScrollPane, you can easily create a table with row header and row footer using just one table model. TableSplitPane further expanded the idea and allow you to create several tables using a single table model; each table can has its own row header and row footer. Each one has a demo in the demo framework.

JIDE Docking Framework
We fixed a limitation that floating dockable frames cannot be resized from top and left sides, a known issue existed since Docking Framework’s first release. Thanks for the ResizableWindow component we added in this release. In fact, we also introduced ResizablePanel and a basic Resizable class which you can use to make any components resizable. We used ResizablePanel in a lot of places in the demo framework too.

JIDE Common
In addition to JideScrollPane and Resizable components we mentioned above, we also added JideToggleSplitButton. From the name you can tell is a toggleable JideSplitButton. JideSplitButton can now disable button part separately while menu part is still enabled.

A nice feature is added TreeSearchable – if your tree has limited number of nodes (this is very important), you can call setRecursive(true) so that the searchable will search all tree nodes to find matching node even the parent node might be collapsed. We also added an option to hide close button from JideTabbedPane, a feature users requested for a while.

JIDE Components
CollapsiblePane is the star in this release. We added Office 2003 Theme support for CollapsiblePane, a missing feature since we introduced Office 2003 L&F. You probably noticed this feature already if you ran the demo framework on Windows XP. Don’t miss a new style we added to CollapsiblePane, called PLAIN_STYLE. In addition, a new component CollapsiblePanes is introduced to make it easier to group several collapsible panes together.

We included two new components, JidePopup and Alert, into JIDE Components. They are still in beta status but you still don’t want to miss them. Without mentioning too much detail here, I suggest you check out the two demos for JidePopup and Alert from the demo framework. I am sure you will like them.

Want to know more? Please see detailed change log. If you are existing customers, please continue to download page to download 1.7.0 release. If you are still evaluating our products, please proceed to  evaluation page to download the latest evaluation package.

JIDE Software has launched a brand new and improved website, dedicated to serve customers and users better. Here is site map of this new website. The goal of this redesign is to make the navigation in the site easier and smoother. A couple of notable changes include a bigger header area to allow further improvement in the future, left navigation area on every page, consistent look and feel across all pages, more products screenshot and feature description etc.

If you have any suggestions or feedbacks about this website you'd like to tell us, please feel free to send an email to info@jidesoft.com and let us know.

The previous web site had been running for almost two years. Even though it's a very simple one, it served its purpose. Here is some interesting statistics just in past one year (last 12 months since October of 2003). There are 1,905,107 hits, 62,166 visits, 36,463 unique visitors. The most popular webstart demo has been run 31,662 times. 7,346 people downloaded the evaluation package or one of our demos. 946 users registered on the developer forum. A special thanks for JavaLobby for its help for JIDE and its contribution to Java community. It referred over 7,000 visitors to our website. Followed by Google at 6,300, no wonder the No. 1 search engine.

Let's say goodbye and thanks to our old web site and welcome the new one!

October 7, 2004
JIDE announces the final release of JIDE Action Framework and Office2003 style LookAndFeel

After several months of preparation, JIDE Software announced the release of her fifth product. It's a new product called JIDE Action Framework. As each of our products has its own focus, this product is all about menu bar and toolbars. It provides powerful dockable toolbar and menu bar (a.k.a. command bar) functionality. Along with existing products such as JIDE Docking Framework, JIDE Components, JIDE Grids and JIDE Dialogs, JIDE Action Framework will give you a whole new experience of creating an advanced rich client user interface using pure Java/Swing.

At the same time, we revamped the look and feel of all our products by introducing new Office2003 user interface style. Not only JIDE Action Framework provides full support of the new Office2003 style but also existing products such as JIDE Docking Framework supports this new style too.

Please see some screenshots of this new product and the new Office2003 style at here.

Along with the new product, JIDE Software also announces upgrade to all four existing products. They are v1.6.0 of JIDE Docking Framework, v1.4.0 of JIDE Components and JIDE Grids, and v1.1.1 of JIDE Dialogs. Existing active customers can proceed to the password-protected download page to download the upgrade.

The new product is immediately available for purchase, either as standalone product or with other products as product bundle. For more purchase information, please visit the purchase page.

JIDE Software announces v1.3.2 release of JIDE Grids which includes a new component called HierarchicalTable. HierarchicalTable is a special JTable which can show any components inside the table in a hierarchical way. Please see here for one of the many possible ways of using this new component. We also updated the evaluation package to include this new component. This component is still in beta, so please feel free to try it and give us suggestions and feedbacks.

At the same time, we also announce v1.5.1 release of JIDE Docking Framework. A nice feature we added is to change cursor during dockable frame drag and drop to indicate where the frame will be dropped.

JIDE Software releases JIDE Docking Framework 1.5.0. The main features we introduced in 1.5 release are

1. Made workspace area optional. Workspace is an area in the center of an application where you put documents etc. With this new feature, even your applications don't have document concept, you still can use Docking Framework so that your user can arrange other dockable windows easily.

2. Drag-n-drop dockable frame to/from workspace area. With this feature, workspace now can seamlessly integrate with other part of Docking Framework.

3. Added maximum button to the title bar of dockable frame. And you can choose what buttons to show on title bar. With this feature, Docking Framework becomes JDesktopPane replacement, and even better. It allows you to maximize, minimum (autohide), floating any child windows so that user can optimize their working environment on fly.

If you are interested in our products and would like to evaluate them, please proceed to here to try the web start demo or download the evaluation package. The evaluation package includes complete developer guides, full javadoc, and over 20 examples with source code. To make it easier for you, we also include project files for major Java IDEs as well as ant script so that you can get those examples running in just a minute.

May 10, 2004
JIDE announces a new release of all four products

JIDE Software releases JIDE Docking Framework 1.4.3, JIDE Components 1.3.4, JIDE Grids 1.3.0 and JIDE Dialogs 1.0.2.

There are many bug fixes and feature enhancements since last release. Please visit here for the list of changes.

If you are existing customers who are still under annual support maintenance, please continue to download page to download the latest release using your user name and password. If you would like to evaluate our products, please visit this page. 

February 29, 2004
JIDE announces a new release of all four products

JIDE Software releases JIDE Docking Framework 1.4.1, JIDE Components 1.3.2, JIDE Grids 1.2.1 and JIDE Dialogs 1.0.1.

After listening to feedbacks from Mac OS X users, we redesigned the Aqua L&F of dockable frame to match with brush-metal theme. You can see the screenshot at here. This release is after four patch releases on top of 1.4.0. So there are a lot of bug fixes and feature enhancements since 1.4.0 release.

If you are existing customers who are still under annual support maintenance, please continue to download page to download the latest release using your user name and password. If you would like to evaluate our products, please visit this page. 

January 4, 2004
JIDE announces a new release of JIDE Docking Framework and JIDE Grids

JIDE Software releases JIDE Docking Framework 1.4.0 and JIDE Grids 1.2.0

Several major features are introduced to this new release of JIDE Docking Framework. These features include maximize/restore of dockable frame, undo/redo support for drag-n-drop operations done to dockable frames, better handle of keyboard focus and better L&F support for Alloy L&F and Plastic3D L&F.

On JIDE Grids side, major enhancement was done on DateChooserPanel and DateComboBox. Now, you can set minDate and maxDate to a DateChooserPanel. We also provided a very flexible way to set any dates as invalid dates so that user cannot choose those dates. In addition, we added an option to show week of year information in the calendar. Another major enhancement is all AbstractComboBox and PopupPanel such as DateChooserPanel, DateComboBox, ColorChooserPanel, ListComboBox etc fully support keyboard-only environment. Because of this enhancement, you can edit all rows in PropertyTable without using mouse.

If you are existing customers who are still under annual support maintenance, please continue to download page to download the latest release using your user name and password. If you would like to evaluate our products, please visit this page. 

November 30, 2003
JIDE announces the availability of a new product - JIDE Dialogs

JIDE Software continues expanding product line and marches towards the goal of a complete GUI solution. Today we are happy to announce the availability of a brand new product - JIDE Dialogs. One of the major components in this new product is Wizard.

JIDE Dialogs is a product to make your creation of dialogs in Swing easier. As the name indicates, this product will focus on all kinds of dialogs. It will introduce a simple yet useful base class - StandardDialog. On top of this class, several pre-built dialogs are created – such as wizard dialog, multiple-page dialog which can be used to display user options and preference, and tip of today dialog.

October 8, 2003
JIDE announces the support for AquaLookAndFeel on Mac OS X

JIDE Software announces the availability of 1.3.0 release of JIDE Docking Framework. In this release, support for AquaLookAndFeel is added. Please check out a screenshot from here. You can get the AquaLookAndFeel from Apple's ADC website.

At the same time, we also announce the release of 1.1 for JIDE Grids. A new component called SortableTable is introduced to this product. Different from most other sortable table implementations, this SortableTable can sort by multiple columns.

September 9, 2003
JIDE announces the availability of a new product - JIDE Grids

JIDE Software continues expanding product line and marches towards the goal of a complete GUI solution. Today we are happy to announce the availability of a brand new product - JIDE Grids. One of the major components in this new product is PropertyGrid - a special two-column JTable which can show the properties of any object.

Along the release of JIDE Grids, JIDE also announces version 1.2.5 release of existing JIDE Docking Framework and JIDE Components products.

If you are existing JIDE customers as of September 9, 2003 and still under our maintenance support, you will receive JIDE Grids for free along with 1.2.5 release.

August 6, 2003
JIDE Docking Framework is covered by Javalobby newsletter as headline

Rick Ross, founder of Javalobby, recently tried our product in a Swing application he and Matthew Schmidt are working on. He liked our product so much and decided to cover it in the most recent Javalobby newsletter titled as "It Makes You Love Being a Java Developer". If you are a Javalobby member, maybe you already received this newsletter. If not, you can read the copy from here. You can see it on Javalobby's website as well.

August 4, 2003
JIDE Docking Framework has been selected and reported by Swing Sightings Column 16

We are glad to announce that JIDE Docking Framework product from JIDE software has been announced and reported by Swing Sightings Column 16, the most comprehensive collection of excellent Swing applications. Please visit their website for more information.

August 3, 2003
Visual Paradigm released Visual Paradigm for UML which includes JIDE Docking Framework and JIDE Components

One of our customers, Visual Paradigm, released their Visual Paradigm for UML product. It fully leverages JIDE Docking Framework and JIDE Components to create a powerful but easy-to-use GUI application. You can see get a free community edition from their website. They also prepared a demo for dockable window feature - just click on "Dockable Look and Feel" link on the right pane of this page.

We will continue to make this kind of announcement as more and more of our customers release their products using JIDE.

July 11, 2003
JIDE announces a new release which includes two new components

JIDE software announces a new release of both JIDE Docking Framework and JIDE Components. In this new release, two new components are included. They are
1. FloorTabbedPane, also known as Outlook Bar
2. CollapsiblePane, also known as task bar which you can find in Windows XP.
Please visit here to see screenshots of these two new components.

June 1, 2003
JIDE announces a new release which includes EclipseLookAndFeel

JIDE software announces a new release of both JIDE Docking Framework and JIDE Components. In this new release, EclipseLookAndFeel is included for the first time. There are also many bug fixes and smaller feature enhancements which are included.

March 17, 2003
JIDE releases JIDE Docking Framework 1.2.1

JIDE software announces a new release of JIDE Docking Framework (1.2.1). In this release, there are two major improvements.

1. There are two title bars when a dockable frame is in floated state, which causes user's confusion. In 1.2.1 release, there is only one title bar.
2. When dockable frame is dragged outside main window, the outline of the dragged frame is painted partially. In 1.2.1, we also fixed this problem. The full outline will be painted no matter where the outline is.

March 2, 2003
JIDE announces the support for JDK1.3 in all product lines

For those who want to use JIDE Docking Framework but has to stay on JDK1.3 for various reasons, this is good news for you. Due to number of requests from users, we decide to support both JDK1.4 and JDK1.3. Please follow this link to get a demo working under JDK1.3.

We didn’t cut any features when porting to JDK1.3. The most important, the APIs didn’t change at all. It means you don’t need modify a single line of your code which reference to JIDE library when you migrate to 1.4 later.

November 15, 2002
JIDE releases JIDE Docking Framework 1.0

JIDE Software just released JIDE Docking Framework. It is a 100% Swing-based GUI Framework, written in Java. The framework mimics the user-interface style of drag and drop, dockable windows found within the Visual Studio .NET IDE.

Features
* Provide your end-users powerful docking window functionality within minutes
* Uses the latest in user-interface design concepts, originated in Visual Studio .NET
* Dock dockable windows on all sides of a central client area in the main window
* Dock several dockable windows in one area, displayed with tabs
* Place dockable windows in auto-hide mode for optimization of screen real estate
* Float dockable windows above the main window
* Dock dockable windows in any combination within floating frames
* Full support of a complex hierarchy of dockable windows in any area
* Show and hide dockable windows
* Load and save dockable window layout data directly to data files or persist layout data in some other media, such as a database
* Instantly switch between window layouts - useful for IDEs when state switching occurs between Code and Runtime modes