Laird Nelson’s Blog: June 2005 Archive

Background

Different people have different ideas on how an application should work when it can open many different documents of many different types at the same time, and, most importantly, when its value derives from being able to see those documents side-by-side (ruling out, for example, a JTabbedPane-based interface). Some like a true, old-school MDI feel; others like there to be multiple external windows, à la Microsoft Word. My current project’s customers are evenly divided on the subject.

To make everyone happy, I decided to start with a JDesktopPane-based MDI core. Then I added the ability to detach the JInternalFrames from the desktop pane and open them up as external windows—i.e. to make the window hop off the application desktop and onto the user desktop (and, potentially, back again). This comparatively small insight has led to a surprisingly intuitive way of managing the application’s information. When you just want to look at one thing and have it be your central focus, it is easier to have it be in an external window. On the other hand, when you want to look at two things side by side, it seems easier to grasp their relationship to each other and to their containing application if they’re presented inside an MDI.