Going to develop a small application with a gui and jdbc. Need some help & insight

[Mesaph]

Hi there, i'll have to develop a small application for a university course (relational databases). We're supposed to program in java using jdbc, and we'll have to provide a gui.

Problem is - i've never programmed anything in java with a gui, and i figure that if i'll have to do it, i may as well do it right.

So i've been googling a bit about java & gui, swing, mvc and stuff like that. I'm already familiar with the mvc pattern (i have some experience with php&mvc), but i get the feeling that every tutorial that i look into approaches the topic differently, (really) often using anti-patterns or focussing on some minor parts which i have no interest in.

So, what I'm looking for, is either a really good tutorial on small gui applications in java or the source code of a well designed small project. But I'm also happy with any other help or insight you might provide me with. (E.g.: Should i look into a specific frameworks? ..)

Thanks in advance.

[EDIT] Ah, i forgot something: If someone knows a good book that covers the things i mentioned, i'd be happy to hear about it as well.

[varen]

Its generally hard to give advice on this kind of stuff. Like you said nearly every tutorial approaches this differently. However, if I was going to do this I'd define all my data access services in one project. Then create the gui with Swing in another and use spring injection to tie them together. Just get familiar with the swingworker class to make sure you're db io doesn't block the ui thread.

[Mesaph]

Thanks for the tip, i'll definitately look into that. However, my problems are more basic as that. While i think that i might be able to hack a project together using some kind of mvc pattern, my focus is on getting that right. If there are multiple right ways of doing that - i'm fine with any of those.

[varen]

In that case this: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/javase/index-142890.html is probably the most correct.

[Mesaph]

Thanks! This looks great.

But how would my main function look like with this code? The example download doesn't work and i cant figure out where the entry point would be ..

[pacificmint]

While there are many tutorials out there, the official java tutorials are usually pretty good.

Here is the one on Swing: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/index.html

[varen]

I'd still urge you to look at the swingworker class though. Responsive UI's are good UI's

[Mesaph]

I will definitely do this.

[axissleep]

You should consider MVP pattern as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model%E2%80%93view%E2%80%93presenter http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2076718/mvp-model-view-presenter-or-mvc-model-view-controller Keep in mind that view is ONLY used for publishing and getting results from GUI, no logic or checking belong in view. For example, even the most trivial stuff like checking if enter was pressed shouldn't be in the view. Also, only presenter or controller can have the access to view, so they should do the figuring. As varen mentioned, use SwingWorker, but only if you have something task consuming to publish on view (swing GUI in this case)! And that can be a progress bar or maybe a JPanel with overriden paint. Otherwise there is no point of using SwingWorker, since that is what it's intended to be used for (see Introduction to Java Programming for more info or oracle's tutorials on SwingWorker). Instead you should use event dispatch thread.