Buoy
A Better User Interface Toolkit
What Is Buoy?
Buoy is a library for creating user interfaces in Java programs. It is built on top of Swing,
but provides a completely new set of classes to represent graphical components. It offers many
advantages over using Swing directly, including:
- A much simpler, cleaner, and more consistent API
- A better mechanism for laying out interface components
- A far more powerful event handling mechanism, which is based on dynamic binding of arbitrary
methods as event listeners
- Built in support for serializing user interfaces as XML, then reconstructing them again
Other important features of Buoy include:
- It forms a "transparent wrapper" around Swing. It hides the complexity of Swing when you
don't want to deal with it, but doesn't get in your way when you actually need that complexity.
- It is very small and efficient. The entire compiled library is only 200 K.
- It is written entirely in Java, and works on any JVM that is compatible with J2SE 1.4 or later.
- All source code is in the public domain.
Download
Download Buoy (1 MB, includes source code, documentation, and the compiled library)
Documentation
About Buoy: This is a detailed introduction to programming with Buoy.
It describes the design of the library, how it differs from Swing, and how to use its major features.
API Documentation: Javadoc style documentation for the classes in Buoy.
Tutorials: François Guillet has
written a series of tutorials demonstrating how to use various parts of Buoy.
Feedback
Bug reporting,
feature request tracking,
and discussion forums are provided
through SourceForge.
Related Projects
The Buoy Docking Framework
is a library for creating user interfaces based around dockable panels.
This allows the different parts of a window to be rearranged by the user.
There are several graphical layout tools
for constructing Buoy-based user interfaces:
- BuoyBuilder is a commercial
application. It may be used at no cost for developing open source applications
released under the
Open Software License. Any other use requires purchasing a license.
- Balise by François Guillet is an open source application.
- Minuet by Tom Demuyt
is still at an early stage and has not been updated in a while.
Status
The current version of Buoy is 1.9, released May 1, 2008. It is stable,
extensively tested, and ready for production use.
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