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| ===What is the Window System?=== |
| The windowing system is what creates the main application window, and makes it |
| possible to open components in the UI. The API for the windowing system is in the package |
| <tt>org.openide.windows</tt>. The implementation of the windowing system is in the module |
| <tt>org.netbeans.core.windows</tt> (core.windows in Mercurial repository, was core/windows in CVS). |
| |
| The window system defines [[DevFaqWindowsMode| Mode]]s which are places in the main window |
| occupied by tabbed containers. [[DevFaqWindowsTopComponents| TopComponent]]s are GUI |
| components (instances or subclasses of <tt>org.openide.windows.TopComponent</tt> which |
| can be put into these tabbed containers. |
| |
| There is a [[DevFaqModulesDeclarativeVsProgrammatic| programmatic API]] for creating/opening |
| TopComponents - this is useful for testing components under development - just create an Action which |
| calls <tt>new MyTopComponent().open()</tt> to quickly try out GUI components. |
| |
| However, the main API modules use the [[DevFaqWindowsWstcrefAndFriends| declarative XML Window System API]] to install their components, for the following reasons: |
| |
| * Scalability: Components do not need to be created/deserialized unless they really need to be opened |
| * Singletonization: You wouldn't want to have 5 Projects tabs in the IDE. Using the XML API correctly, you can easily refer to the singleton instance of your component once it's instantiated (almost) for free. |
| * Persistence: The window system associates components with unique IDs; to properly persist your component across sessions, you need to use the XML APIs |
| |
| ===Apache Migration Information=== |
| |
| The content in this page was kindly donated by Oracle Corp. to the |
| Apache Software Foundation. |
| |
| This page was exported from http://wiki.netbeans.org/DevFaqWindowsGeneral , |
| that was last modified by NetBeans user Cvdenzen |
| on 2012-02-16T12:52:35Z. |
| |
