Overview

Rowan is here to share with you some free Swing components, utilities, tips, and tricks. It does not and never will have the least ambition to dictate any sort of ideology or vision to those of you who decide to use it in your development. Since the late nineties the author has been working with Java and Swing, in particular, and so he had a chance to see Swing libraries and applications of prominence and work on several interesting and non-trivial ones. He truly believes, understood and done right, Swing helps create end-user applications of profound efficiency and elegance.

At present Rowan consists of the three parts:

• Swing2D includes the small components and classes to help you build better or a bit more stylish UI. A good example here might be JPaintedPanel using which you can easily customize the appearance of your application surfaces. This part is still tiny but is expected to grow fast.
• Wizard assists you with creation of consistently looking and working wizards of varying levels of complexity. This part is alpha-mature at the least. While it needs more testing and lacks some important features, you can use it to create wizards quickly even now.
• Applications intended to demonstrate the features implemented in Rowan make it three. Have fun with Rowan Wizardly Riddler!

Events

Downloads

1. Check out the sources from CVS. You will find the detailed instructions on the spot.
2. Make sure you have Apache Maven installed on your box. 
3. For Maven to find and download all the necessary dependencies you should be online while building Rowan. Since the main Maven remote repository at Ibiblio does not host the JGoodies libraries you should configure your Maven installation to use http://objectstyle.org/maven/  as a secondary remote repository (see the official Maven User Guide). Otherwise, you can create jgoodies/jars directory in your local Maven repository and put forms-1.0.2.jar, forms-extras-1.0.2.jar, and looks-1.1.3.jar from the Rowan's distribution there. The rest of dependencies is available from Ibiblio and will be downloaded automatically.
4. Run maven from the root directory of the checked out Rowan CVS tree.
5. The complete distribution will be created in the nodes/gui/target/node directory. In addition, the rowan components will be installed in your local Maven repository.

Note: Rowan jar files do not include third-party class files nor will in the future. Instead, their manifests have the necessary Class-Path entries, and the used third-party jar files are included in the distribution. This helps make sure you have as few version conflicts as possible and fewer library duplications.

Jars: Rowan Components and Dependencies

Developers