Comments on: JTable: Time to Rethink NIH?

By: Cameron Zemek

Cameron Zemek — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 09:25:34 +0000

I’m the author of JGrid in the Jeppers project (http://jeppers.sf.net) and its written from scratch. You can see a demo of it in action at http://grom.zeminvaders.net/jspread-demo which is an (unpolished) spreadsheet application built on top of JGrid. I haven’t work on it for a number of years though, but I believe the codebase is an excellent start for a full featured spreadsheet component.

By: Ziad Mansouri

Ziad Mansouri — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 03:37:11 +0000

Done! And I’d be surprised if it hasn’t been done a number of times already and won’t be done some more times too! I can’t say for whom, and I can’t share the code, but I can say that Swing, to its credit, gives you all you need to accomplish a very close Excel-ish look and feel. The take-away for me is that one can write a quality component from scratch (or based on JTable ) if one puts their mind to it.

By: Guruprasad

Guruprasad — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 11:38:56 +0000

I am having three independent Jtables (No corelation between the tables), after clicking the Find mode in one table, all the tables are enabling the Find Mode. But What I need is only the table I am clicking on, the find mode should be enabled to read the query and other tables should still show the data.

Thanks,
Guru

By: JEff

JEff — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 19:12:44 +0000

I am currently working on a project that a user can read, modify, and write excel via POI. We use a JTable and I think it works well if you pretty good at customizing a JTable.

By: Mike

Mike — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 18:00:05 +0000

You should check out the JGrid component of Jeppers: http://jeppers.sf.net/

By: Neil Weber

Neil Weber — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 21:17:45 +0000

I don’t think the problem is NIH. The problem is as you mentioned in your first random thought: “This is a really hard project.” It’s far easier to hack JTable.

WinForms has two table controls: a ListView ala Windows Explorer and a DataGrid. I think this is right. People use table components for a wide variety of purposes and I don’t think one component can suit all needs.

By: Trey Moore

Trey Moore — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 14:17:56 +0000

I believe you are absolutely correct here. Never have I seen a Swing-based component that can truly hang w/ Excel, and it would be beneficial for a huge number of people to have a responsive, Excel-like data grid. What is OpenOffice using? Is it swing-based?
Its not like enough people haven’t tried to solve this problem using JTable, and yet all of their attempts have come up short. You are right. The time has come to solve this problem with a brand new component targeted specifically at Excel-like behavior.

-Trey

By: Dennis S

Dennis S — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 13:33:12 +0000

I took a look @Jesse’s pdf and it has some really good ideas. I’d love a discussion with the author of Visi-Calc, or other such “*.calc’s” to see what they thought they’d done right and wrong in their designs. Some of them are open source now. Good points, as always. Maybe Scala or Ruby will make this trivial, maybe not.

As Always…

By: Jesse

Jesse — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 03:55:22 +0000

I spent a few days planning this exact project back when I was still working on Swing. I didn’t get much further than setting up a java.net project and writing down some ideas:
https://jwtable.dev.java.net/jwtable.pdf