Java News from Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Tim Boudreau is working on the Wizard API, an open source Java library that:

Provides a simple API and UI for Wizards, a commonly used UI pattern in GUI interfaces. Traditionally, everybody has needed to write their own Wizards from scratch, and such code is painful and hard to get right.

This library aims to provide a simple, relatively bulletproof API for writing Wizards. The UI for Wizards is pluggable; the default implementation conforms to the JLF usability guidelines for Wizards.

This library was originally designed as a replacement for NetBeans' Wizards API, and takes into account the long history of that API and problems encountered with it over the years. It provides a simple, easy-to-use solution that enables any Swing application to provide Wizards with a minimum of code and effort.

The Wizard API is published under the Common Development and Distribution License, a somewhat unusual choice.