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okdokie · Guest

Hi everyone,

I am trying to develop a preferences framework for a GUI based
application written in Java. Some requirements include:

1) The user should be able to view/modify the preferences for a
particular component by right-clicking it. The preferences shown should
be contextual.

2) The user should be able to store preferences for each instance/view
of a particular blotter/form and these should be available even when
that instance is closed or deleted. This is similar to the profile
feature available under Eclipse.

3) The framework should be scalable/extensible, in that, we should be
able to add more preferences to old components, add preferences for new
components and also support various forms of presentation of these
preferences such as tabs, check boxes etc.

In order to familiarize myself with the process of developing a
framework (especially a gui-based one), I am reading up on
documentation for the preferences framework in projects such as Eclipse
and Mozilla and also looking up the UIManager class under Java.

If anyone has been involved in a similar endeavor, could you provide
some guidelines and/or advice on how I can approach the architecture of
the preferences data and their display? Any links to related reading
material/books would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.