Swirrel is a little framework which allows its users to annotate AWT or Swing components in Java and to avoid the painstaking writing of listeners.

Swirrel reads the annotations and attaches the aproriate listeners automatically. All you have to do is to provide the name of the methods which should be called by the Swirrel listener.

Swirrel is a double edged sword, it can make things much easier, but you can shoot yourself in the foot (hey, a sword you can shoot with!). Please consider carefully if Swirrel is right for you and your project.

Don't use Swirrel for deeply nested, complex and/or time critical GUIs. Note that using Swirrel requires more testing, as things that caused compile time errors before cause runtime errors now.

In order to create and attach the listeners, you have to call Swirrel.process (myTopLevelFrame) when your GUI is ready or to use a subclass of JFrame called SwFrame.

The Swirrel listeners are totally normal listeners, you can remove them or add your own ones.

Currently the following listeners are supported:
· ActionListener (actionPerformed)
· FocusListener (focusGained, focusLost)
· KeyListener (keyTyped, keyPressed, keyReleased)
· MouseListener (mouseClicked, mousePressed, mouseReleased, mouseEntered, mouseExited)
· MouseMotionListener (mouseMoved, mouseDragged)
· MouseWheelListener (mouseWheelMoved)
· PropertyChangeListener (propertyChange)

Publisher: Daniel Gronau

Tags: Java framework, Java listener,