### Abeille Forms Designer

Copyright © 2004 JETA Software, Inc. All rights reserved. http://www.jetaware.com

Installation

Quick Start

Designer

Look And Feel

Development

Code Generation

API

License

Abeille Forms Designer is a tool for quickly designing cross-platform graphical user interfaces. Forms Designer is a Swing based application and uses Swing components.

Forms Designer depends on the JGoodies FormLayout Manager (Forms Designer includes all the software you need). The FormLayout is a powerful, open source layout manager which you can use to programmatically create layouts in Java. Abeille works on top of the FormLayout and allows you to build forms visually using drag and drop. Abeille also includes support for images and painting effects such as gradients, textures, and dynamic colors (based on current look and feel).

The FormLayout project is located at https://forms.dev.java.net. However, Abeille includes all the files you need. To understand this layout manager, it is important to read the FormLayout whitepaper included with this documentation (included with permission from Karsten Lentzsch).

The FormLayout is a grid based layout manager. Forms can be created by defining a grid and adding Swing components to cells on the grid. Each cell, row, and column can be constrained to a specified size and resize behavior. In Abeille users can create forms by dragging Swing components from a pallette to a cell on the currently active form. Once GUI is completed, the design information is saved to a file. Abeille is not a code generator. Rather developers create form files using the designer and reference these files in their own applications to display the forms. The forms runtime is open sourced under the BSD license and may be freely distributed.

#### Installation

Forms Designer requires Java 1.4 or higher. The current download does not include the Java runtime, so you must install Java yourself if you currently don't have it. You can download Java from: http://www.java.com

Abeille Forms are pacakged in a ZIP file (abeilleforms.zip). This file contains the following:

designer.jar | The main JAR file for the application.
formsrt.jar | The forms runtime. You distribute this JAR with your application. This is the only file you may distribute.
README.txt | The README file for Abeille Forms.
documentation/ | The documentation directory.

You can now start Abeille Forms. Simply type:

         java -jar designer.jar

You can also double-click designer.jar if your OS supports running executable JAR files this way.