SwingX-WS contains a set of JavaBeans for interacting with web services. Initial beans include support for several Yahoo and Google webservices such as searching news, video, images, and financial data, as well as a generic tile based mapping component (as seen in the Aerith demo at JavaOne 2006), The SwingX-WS beans have been designed with graphical configuration in mind and work very well inside of a JavaBeans aware editor such as NetBeans.

The SwingX-WS project is actively seeking new developer to enhance the existing beans and build new ones. We would especially like to see beans for accessing Google's search services, Flickr photos, Microsoft Live, MusicBrainz metadata, and enhancements to the JXMapViewer for connecting to NASA map servers. Please join the SwingLabs forum and mailing list

Currently the SwingX-WS project has the following beans:

  • BackgroundWorker: a configurable wrapper around SwingWorker for performing long running tasks.
  • JXMapViewer: a generic viewer for tile based map servers
  • Yahoo Search: a non-visual bean for calling Yahoo's various search services, including images and video

SwingX-WS is released under the LGPL license and is part of the SwingLabs umbrella project on Java.net

Getting the Latest Source

Download the latest release from our CVS repository; full instructions are at https://swingx-ws.dev.java.net/servlets/ProjectSource. But you can check out using the generic account "guest", with these settings

            cvs -d :pserver:guest@cvs.dev.java.net:/cvs login
                        
followed by
            cvs -d :pserver:guest@cvs.dev.java.net:/cvs checkout swingx-ws
                        

Building the Source

SwingX-WS relies on Ant and Ant build files for controlling compilation, building docs, testing, etc. You can use our Ant build scripts or use your own--some IDEs make this easy to do.

To compile from the command line, you'll need to have Apache Ant installed; see http://ant.apache.org.

IMPORTANT: our default task in Ant also runs our unit tests, which are written using jUnit. You need to have Ant be aware of jUnit before compiling SwingX-WS. We can't help you with this--it's an Ant configuration issue.

If jUnit is not properly configured, you may get an error like this:

            BUILD FAILED
            c:\swingx-ws\nbproject\build-impl.xml:407: Following error occured while executing this line
            c:\swingx-ws\nbproject\build-impl.xml:127: Could not create task or type of type: junit.

            Ant could not find the task or a class this task relies upon.
                        

Suggestions:

  • for Ant 1.5.x and previous, make sure optional.jar is in your ANT_HOME\lib directory.
  • for Ant 1.6.x and above, make sure ant-junit.jar is in your ANT_HOME\lib directory, and that jUnit.jar is either in that directory as well OR listed on your CLASSPATH.
You can build SwingX-WS by going to the command line and typing

            ant
                        
That should be it--this will test and build swingx-ws.jar in the dist directory.