27th March 2005
Version 0.6 has been released, which again includes some major
architectural changes, which make it possible to have nested
views as well as nested data objects. Other new features include
the Command/Trigger concept, support for toolbars and a scrollable
desktop. In addition, several bugs have been fixed.
15th September 2004
Version 0.5 has been released, which includes (besides a few minor
modifications) some major architectural changes concerning the
Document-Action-View system. It is now possible to have multiple
views per document.
MDI is the abbreviation for "Multiple Document Interface".
It is an application model which can handle multiple opened documents at the
same time. Typically, MDI applications display multiple "sub-windows" containing
the documents to be edited. Many office applications, text editors, IDE's,
web browsers, ... use MDI interfaces.
In theory, Java provides you with everything you need for creating a MDI
application: you could use JInternalFrame's for emulating the MDI
"look and feel", you could use the Java Document framework, there's also a
javax.swing.undo package, ...
However, I find these components quite difficult to use, and after all, you'd
finally have to "glue" everything together by yourself to finish your MDI
program.
The point is that all MDI applications are actually quite the same. From the GUI
point of view, all MDI applications have some common menu items, for example.
And all MDI applications share some logical entities like documents and actions
that modify the document.
I thought that it would be a good idea to unify all those components needed to
build an MDI application and create a framework which serves as a skeleton for
MDI applications.