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Section: Software and Platforms
The SwingStates Toolkit
Participants : Caroline Appert [correspondant] , Michel Beaudouin-Lafon.
SwingStates [36] is a library that adds state machines and a graphical canvas to the Java Swing user interface toolkit. It was motivated by the lack of widely disseminated toolkits that support advanced interaction techniques and the observation that HCI research toolkits are little used outside the lab. By extending the popular Java Swing toolkit rather than starting from scratch, the goal is to facilitate the dissemination and adoption of SwingStates by practitioners.
SwingStates uses state machines to specify interaction. It provides programmers with a natural syntax to specify state machines and reduces the potential for an explosion of the number of states by allowing multiple state machines to work together or separately. SwingStates can be used to add new interaction techniques to existing Swing widgets, e.g. to select buttons and checkboxes by crossing rather than clicking. It can also be used with the SwingStates canvas (see below) and to control high-level dialogues.
SwingStates also provides a powerful canvas widget. The canvas can contain any Java2D shape, including geometric shapes, images, text strings and even Swing widgets. Shapes can be manipulated individually or collectively, through tags. An intensive use of polymorphism allows to apply almost any command to a tag: the command is then applied to all objects with this tag. Tags are also used in conjunction with state machines, to specify transitions that occur only on objects with a given tag. For example, pie menus can be implemented by creating a canvas in the overlay layer of any Swing application (Figure 3 ).
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SwingStates tightly integrates state machines, the Java language and the Swing toolkit to provide programmers with a natural and powerful extension to their natural programming environment. SwingStates is available at http://swingstates.sf.net under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).