Flamingo: Bringing the Ribbon Component to Swing
TS-4143

Introduced in Microsoft Office 2007, the ribbon component replaces the traditional menu bars and tool bars, aiming to consolidate the program's functions and commands in one place. Targeting mainly large programs with hundreds and thousands of commands, it greatly aids the discoverability of existing features and provides time-saving features such as live preview on ribbon galleries.

Many third-party vendors in the .NET, C#, and Delphi ecosystems have provided complete implementations for certain applications, and Windows 7 will take the ribbon a step further. It will be available for MFC, WPF, and Win32 developers, and some programs bundled with Windows have been rewritten to use ribbon.

The goal of the Flamingo project is to bring a feature-complete ribbon component to Swing applications. Supporting all existing core and third-party look-and-feels, it also provides extension points for interested parties to further fine-tune the visuals.

Among the many features the Flamingo ribbon component supports:

• Application menu button
• Task bar panel
• Contextual task groups
• Extended pop-ups that can host button panels, menu buttons, and more
• Rich tool tips
• Key tips
• Pluggable resizability policies
• Support for shrinking and scrolling
• Hooks for placing content on the decorated title pane

Come to this session to see the Flamingo ribbon component in action and learn how you can bring order and discoverability to your UIs.