Summary
JIDE Software provides Swing widgets, including a docking framework, an MS Office-style look and feel, and a spruced up JTable. Among other UI components, JIDE features a table component that implements the master-detail view UI pattern.
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Master-detail view is a user interface pattern common to many business applications. The pattern centers around a list of items displayed, say, in a table. The user is allowed to select one item from that list—for instance, by clicking on a table row. Selecting an item causes details about that item to display, typically in a form, and often even allows the user to edit any field value in that form.
The detail view can present fields of the selected item not already displayed in a table column, or even expose one-to-many relationships in the data model at the level of the user interface. For example, given a list of orders from an online store, the user can view details of each order, including a list of products that comprise the order, by clicking on a table row representing an order.
While the master-detail view is a staple of many an application, it has been fairly hard implement it in most user interface toolkits, including Swing. JIDE Software's latest release provides a JTable that implements the master-detail view pattern: Clicking on a table row can, optionally, cause the row to expand, revealing more details about the selected row item. Any component can form part of the detail presentation, such as a set of text fields allowing editing of detail information.
In many ways, JIDE's master-detail view table is an indication of a trend in higher-level user interface components that encapsulate common application patterns, making rich-client app construction easier.
Have you implemented a master-detail view in your applications, whether in HTML or with a rich-client toolkit? What other high-level UI patterns do you think major GUI frameworks should focus on?