Design help

[Sanjay]

I am a J2EE developer, and have never developed a swing application before.

So I am in a situation where I have to develop an Installation wizard
which has 6 to 7 steps depending on user input. For forms designed, I
used Abeille and everything seems to be okay, however I am not sure
whether my design is right, by which I mean efficient, extensible and
this is where I am hoping somebody help me out.

My current design is like this.

- a seperate class for each single step(I call it screen) and every
class has a single anonymous class as action listener.
- Every class extend from a single abstract class, which defines look
and feel and other common properties like width, height etc.
- I have a main class, which initializes these classes depending on user
input and stores them in a hashmap (in case user hits back button)

Does this look okay to you? I would appreciate some feedback. Thank you.

 

[Andrew Thompson]

I am no 'desing guru' but as a seasoned GUI developer,
the following sounds supsiciously like 'bad design'.

- Every class extend from a single abstract class, which defines look
and feel and other common properties like width, height etc.

The PLAF can be specified by the initial class
that invokes all other classes (or better the
main, before any single GUI class is instantiated)
all other dialogs, option panes, windows etc. will
default to that PLAF.

Further, the only classes that need to set a
(preferred) size are generally classes that
overide paint()/paintComponent(), or sometimes
JScrollPanes). Barring that, it should not be
necessary to do anything more than using
appropriate layouts, and calling pack(), which
will adjust the GUI to the appropriate size
for whatever PLAF (OS, screen settings, and
user preferences) are set.

If code (needs to, barring the caveats mentioned
above) specify a size for a GUI, that in itself
is a sign of potential problems.

Andrew T.

 

[Lew]

So I am in a situation where I have to develop an Installation [sic] wizard which has 6 to 7 steps depending on user input. For forms designed, I used Abeille and everything seems to be okay, however I am not sure whether my design is right, by which I mean efficient, extensible and this is where I am hoping somebody help me out.

Are you saying that there are six or seven screens of questions the user must
answer to drive the installation process? That is not great user-interface
design, especially if the screens interrupt the installation process ongoingly
to ask their questions.

How about one screen up front where the user fills in everything needed for
the installation, then nothing further until "Installation complete!" pops up?
That way they can get a drink or make love while they're waiting for your
installation, instead of wasting their time baby-sitting it.

-- Lew

 

[Sanjay]

That way they can get a drink or make love while

they're waiting for your installation, instead of wasting their time
baby-sitting it.

-- Lew

Lol.

Yeah that would be good. Not in my case though. My installation wizard
supposed to install and configure two differnet applications, a
low-level application written in c that talks to the custom hardware and
bunch of configuration files for it and a j2ee daemon. Also the wizard
has to take into consideration that these two applications might be
running in two different boxes or in a single box, while the same
wizard supposed to run everywhere. And yes, I am generating all the
files in the end, so user would not have to sit waiting for the wizard
to finish.


Yes it is definitely possible to fit all of this into one screen,
however IMHO, it would not be a user friendly design.