JavaTM Look and Feel Design Guidelines: Advanced Topics > Part II: Special Topics > 5: Idioms >

5: Idioms

One main characteristic of a well-designed user interface is consistency among its parts. This characteristic helps users learn similar parts of the user interface faster. You can help users learn your application's user interface faster by creating its similar parts from the same sets of JFC components--that is, by implementing the same patterns, or idioms.

This chapter explains what idioms are and then describes idioms for:

• Selecting and editing in tables provided by your application
• Arranging such tables
• Combining a tree component with a table
• Working with text fields and lists
• Displaying a hierarchy of containers in a split pane

Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines: Advanced Topics. Copyright 2001. Sun Microsystems, Inc. All Rights Reserved.