View/GUI in Java

[79wjd]

I'm working on making a chess game in Java for one of my CS classes and I'm now up to building the GUI/View portion of the code, but I'm really not sure where to start or how to go about doing it. 

 

Obviously, I'll need the following methods (and probably some helpers), but I'm not sure how to implement any of them. But for right now, just printing the board is my priority (and will probably make the rest relatively trivial). (the model portion is finished and working -- as far as I can tell -- so I have a 2D array keeping track of the board status and an array of players)

 

 

Print/display the board's and the initial configuration. 

Show possible moves for the selected piece. 

Player names, score, move count, and timer.
 

 

[79wjd]

bump 

[AlTech]

16 hours ago, djdwosk97 said:

bump 

You can use Window Builder extension if you're using Eclipse IDE.

 

It helps you design a GUI and let you switch between code and GUI.

[ema42]

As someone already pointed out, Java offers 3 frameworks to build any GUI you'd need: AWT, Swing and JavaFX.

Though AWT and Swing are still supported, JavaFX is the hottest of all to build GUIs since you can pretty much use XML and then inject Java code into it.

 

I'm using IntelliJ as IDE and there's the SceneBuilder plugin which allows you to design your own GUI without spitting blood on XML, if you don't know it; but first let me introduce you to the JavaFX mentality.

Every action you do on the GUI has to be done within the JavaFX Thread, that means that both the GUI controller and the backend have to interact with methods such as Platform.runLater() to apply the visual changes to your chessboard.

This is pretty much the only drawback of JavaFX, since it's far superior to AWT and Swing in performances.

 

I hope it's allowed to link to external tutorial websites; if it is, here you go one of them.

P.S. JavaFX is enterely shipped in native Java code only since the 8th JDK release, so make sure to upgrade to it if you're not using it already.

[MatazaNZ]

On 15/09/2016 at 2:12 PM, Erik Sieghart said:

You can use AWT (awful), Swing (less awful), or JavaFx (I don't know about this one). These are Java frameworks for building GUIs.

JavaFX is the newer platform, and the one that is going to be supported over Swing in future, but Swing would have more features as it's a tried and true framework. That said, JavaFX is only available from Java 8 and up, so if you're planning to target older Java platforms as well, FX won't be the way to go