Products

BE's tools for creating user interfaces are only available for customers of BE Consulting.  BE has made a number of open source contributions, however, which you can download or get involved in.

BE's open source contributions are usually related to Java's Swing user interface toolkit.  BE considers Swing to be the best user interface platform ever created.  It has far more capabilities than other toolkit and can be the basis for any client application, no matter how demanding.  BE has delivered Swing applications for very complex and lively environments, including network management applications and trading applications for a major stock exchange and a major investment house.

Swing was held back by a lack of good tools and a temporary lack of emphasis during the dot-com boom.  This is currently changing rapidly.  Sun has revamped the Swing team and the toolkit is improving before our eyes.  The new NetBeans IDE and other open source projects have improved Swing's toolset.  BE is making its own contributions to the improvement of the Swing platform for the betterment of users everywhere.  We started small and expect to make more major contributions in the future.

These initial releases are available for download from this website, including source under the GNU Lesser Public License. We are currently looking for the most appropriate to host CVS (or Subversion - which BE uses internally) sources. Meanwhile, if you have questions, issues or changes, please email michael@(this doman name).

Event Bus

The EventBus is a small library that provides a big lever for decoupling application components - a publish/subscribe single-VM event mechanism.  Though usable in any context, the EventBus is especially suited for Swing applications.  The EventBus decouples tightly-wound Swing components, makes UIs more testable, and solves all kinds of other nasty design problems in Swing.  The EventBus is well tested, well documented, and production-ready.  Please visit the EventBus site on java.net for more downloads and documentation.

Michael Bushe will be presenting the EventBus at JavaOne 2006.

Swing Action Manager (SAM)

Out-of-the-box Swing's Actions fall short of being of good use in serious client applications.  BE's Swing Action Manager (SAM) makes using Actions a lot easier. SAM is a production-ready JDBC incubator project hosted at java.net. It is extensively documented and fairly well tested. Please visit the SAM site on java.net for more downloads and documentation.

Cancellable Progess Panel

Michael Bushe is a committer to the SwingFX project.  You can read about the a progress "veil" for tasks that are cancelable in Romain Guy's blog. Here is a screenshot of the demo: