Java Pro Article: Styling Java UIs Using CSS

Hi,

  I just stumbled over Philippe Kaplan's (ILOG) Java
Pro article titled "Styling Java User Interfaces:
Improving data display can help users perform tasks
better". 

  Philippe shows why and how to bring the CSS
(Cascading Style Sheets) styling system used for web
pages into the Java world.

  Philippe concludes:

Styling Other Graphic Components:

Most Swing components can be styled as we did with the
JTable. However, the added value becomes more obvious
as the components get more complex. This is why Table,
Tree, and List are good candidates. An implementation
of CSS for Java has been performed in a commercial
product, ILOG JViews, a framework for displaying 2D
graphics like charts, maps, and graphs. The 2D
rendering engine reads input from XML files and is
driven by CSS, which permits the display of data
virtually without writing a line of Java code. To try
a stylable workflow monitoring applet built on ILOG
Jviews, go to
http://www.ilog.com/products/jviews/demos/wf-monitor/index.cfm.

Benefits of CSS Styling:

Styling not only makes the UI more attractive, it also
provides more readable and more relevant rendering. It
can even become a graphic tool to dig into data and to
highlight the data that verifies simple conditions,
although it is not the main purpose of styling.
Sometimes users do not need a full data mining system,
and this simple graphic filtering is good enough to
help find particular items in a table quickly. And it
comes free with the styling mechanism.

Further, the tuning of a UI—that is, finding the right
colors, fonts, and other graphic attributes, is
usually time-consuming. With CSS, the design loop is
faster:

Customizations of objects are gathered in a style
sheet (or several style sheets). 
The syntax of CSS for Java is close to the true CSS,
which speeds up the learning curve. 
Tuning the UI is simplified by the dynamicity of the
implementation. No need to compile or restart the
application to test a change in style, because the
style can be changed while the application is running.
The UI will be updated automatically. 
Bug tracking: the styling system is harmless. If a bug
occurs, it can only happen within the bean setter
invocation. The CSS engine reports this kind of error
to the developer. Of course, all the other advantages
of the true CSS are preserved, like cascading,
inheritance, powerful pattern matching that make
efficient and compact rules, and so on. 

UIs remain the favorite application domain of styling,
because they provide the most spectacular result.
However, the technology serves other purposes as well,
since it basically applies property settings to beans.
For instance, it works nicely for the configuration of
objects, like setting the preferences of an
application or its modules.

Styling the UI enhances the MVC pattern and separates
the business data from the UI rendering. CSS have been
designed for this purpose. Their success in the Web
page authoring domain proves how mature they are.
However, CSS technology appears to be suitable for
styling Java components as well. A proprietary styling
system could probably do the job, too, but reusing a
standard such as CSS, even if it needs tweaking,
speeds up the learning curve to master this module of
customization. For the user, the style sheets applied
to customize Java UIs improve the quality of the
information.

Full story @
http://www.fawcette.com/javapro/2003_05/online/pkaplan_05_29_03/default_pf.asp

  - Gerald

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