Toolkit independent components (TIC) - A Java library for creating GUI components for Swing and SWT

TIC allows to efficiently develop GUI components which can be used both in Swing and SWT projects. The graphical output, as well as mouse and and keyboard reactions of a component need to be implemented only once and TIC allows to use the component in both toolkits. Therefore it provides adapter classes converting both paint methods and mouse and key events between the two toolkits.

Developers who need to offer components that work with Swing and SWT in the same way (e.g. developers of GUI component libraries) can make use of TIC to ease up the implementation process. An example for a GUI library that offers all its components in a Swing and SWT version is LibrAlign for which TIC was initially created.

The first versions of versions of TIC (1.x) were part of bioinfweb.commons, before TIC became a top-level project of bioinfweb. Older release are available for download there. Since version 2.0 TIC is a top-level bioinfweb project. Releases can be found here.

Modules

TIC is separated into the following modules:

• info.bionfweb.tic.core: The main module of TIC containing all implementations that are not toolkit specific.
• info.bionfweb.tic.swing: Swing-specific implementations.
• info.bionfweb.tic.swt: SWT-specific implementations.

If you create GUI components based in TIC, the three modules will need to be distributed along with your package. (Make sure to be compliant with the license of TIC.) Applications that make use of a TIC based component will always depend on the core but only need to include one toolkit specific module (depending if they are a Swing or a SWT application). Pure Swing applications will not need to import any SWT related dependencies.

Documentation

The documentation of TIC can be found here, including its JavaDocs and an example application.