Part III. Creating Applications

This part explains how to use the Skeleton Package, a set of interfaces and classes which provide a standard user interface implementation of a typical graph-oriented application. This includes all required views and editors, such as a document window, an element repository, a navigator, a toolbar, an attribute editor and a menu. As an application developer, you simply have to add and customize those features that are specific to your application.

The Skeleton Package was designed to support different windowing toolkits. These include the Swing API and AWT (included in the Java Runtime Environment) and JFace and SWT (which is shipped with the Eclipse Development Environment).

In order to provide support for all of these different windowing toolkits, the Tensegrity Skeleton Package provides a number of abstract interfaces and concrete toolkit implementations. In the following chapters we aim to give you a fundamental understanding of our application framework by showing examples that use the Swing API implementation only.