What is the best Java GUI methodology for ease of maintenance and enhancement?

I need advice on how to rewrite a java GUI. Ultimate goal is easier to maintain & enhance.

What I have built is a Java Applet Client interface that acts and behave similar to Eclipse. devel开发者_StackOverflow社区oper can design their data entry forms without using a single line of code (drag and drop), and define its attribute. This part is pretty well iron out. however, i am left with more than 40,000 lines of codes that is very difficult to maintain.

Each time a bug is occur or a new enhancement, i normally cant program in a more direct way. more than half the time, i need to workaround the problem and that adds up the lines of code.

Consideration:

-Java Web Applet (because it runs on any browser with J2RE installed)

-runs on slow machine

-deployment of around 200 nodes and growing

Problems that i currently have:

-Listeners are all over the place. sometimes is inside the element.AddListener(new listener..). Sometimes is outside of the class, could be in another package that contain all the rest of listener. Question: is it always good idea to put all listener in another package? if that is that case, i cant use "this." to get the reference i need.

-JTable this is a killer to me :( the problem i had on Cannot access the Jtable column data after set invisible still persist. Imagine i have JTable with 3 column. First column is a dropDown, second and third column is a textfield. Whenever a value choose from dropdown, i need to base on the selected value, and update to the second column and third column. the problem is, if the user click and it click on other row very fast, it will update to a column that is in the wrong row.

-Currently the program is coded in the sense of it is single thread. whenever the user does a http connection to the server side, reading a file, writing a file and etc, i need to make it as asynchronous process so it doenst feel like "program hang". what is the best way to do this?

Really appreciate help here! Thanks!

Lots of questions here and I'm not sure where to start but I can sympathize with you one this one. Unless you have a well seasoned team that has already gone through the pains of Swing application development things can quickly become out of control and unmanageable.

Before you adventure into re-writing a project I would start with defining some simple standards for development. Like package structures and listeners. I would also recommend splitting the application up into well unit tested modules or sub projects.

Also, ask yourself if you really need to re-write the application or does it just need some TLC. As a consultant and Director of IT I see developers always wanting to re-write applications just because they've learned something new or don't think it's up to par. When they come to me and tell me that it's junk and needs to be re-written I usually send them back and ask them to come up with alternative solutions to a re-write and the impact of each solution including - doing nothing. In a lot of cases we didn't write the application at all.

[UPDATE] Lastly, If you are going to re-write I would use a Domain Driven Design and MVC approach. Yes, I said MVC for desktop applications!. We've had great success with these methodologies. It keeps a good separation of concern and makes things easily re-usable. It also provides the structure to easily switch out the presentation layer. Most importantly it's easy to unit test and any developer that understands MVC can understand the basics of your project without knowing the details.

I have some more thoughts but i'll leave it at that for now. ;)

use dsl for gui:

• swinghtmltemplate
• swixml
• yaml

there are some more of them

this will remove the need to describe listeners, allow binding in dsl manner

Why dont you just reuse the eclipse framework to build your own gui instead of writing it from scratch in Swing ?