SwingStates: Adding state machines to Java and the Swing toolkit

Caroline Appert (1, 2) , Michel Beaudouin-Lafon (1, 2)

1 IN-SITU - Situated interaction
2 LRI - Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique

This article describes SwingStates, a Java toolkit designed to facilitate the development of graphical user interfaces and bring advanced interaction techniques to the Java platform. SwingStates is based on the use of finite-state machines specified directly in Java to describe the behavior of interactive systems. State machines can be used to redefine the behavior of existing Swing widgets or, in combination with a new canvas widget that features a rich graphical model, to create brand new widgets. SwingStates also supports arbitrary input devices to implement novel interaction techniques based, for example, on bi-manual or pressure-sensitive input. We have used SwingStates in several Master's level classes over the past two years and have developed a benchmark approach to evaluate the toolkit in this context. The results demonstrate that SwingStates can be used by non-expert developers with little training to successfully implement advanced interaction techniques.

Domains: Human-Computer Interaction [cs.HC]

Caroline Appert, Michel Beaudouin-Lafon. SwingStates: Adding state machines to Java and the Swing toolkit. Software: Practice and Experience, 2008, 38 (11), pp.1149-1182. ⟨10.1002/spe.867⟩. ⟨inria-00538334⟩