July 14, 2005

JIDE Software announces the 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 (http://www.jidesoft.com/products/grids.htm) to see new screenshots or run webstart demo (http://www.jidesoft.com/products/download.htm) try out 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 about this release? Please see detailed change log at http://www.jidesoft.com/history/index.htm. If you are existing customers, please continue to customer download page http://www.jidesoft.com/downloads/ 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 http://www.jidesoft.com/products/download.htm to run the latest web start demo and download the evaluation package.

Until next time,

JIDE Software, Inc.
We make you love to be a Swing developer!

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About JIDE Software
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JIDE Software is a private held software company that focusing on providing rich client solutions
and services using Java technology. Founded in 2002, JIDE Software has developed five products and
over 50 professional Swing components that cover almost every aspect of Java/Swing development.

With more than 300 customers in 30 countries worldwide, JIDE Software is the clear market leader.
Many companies are depending on technologies JIDE provides to build their applications or frameworks,
deliver their customers with a polished user interface, and simplify their in-house development.

For further information, please contact support at jidesoft dot com or visit our website
at http://www.jidesoft.com.