Creating Applets with Scala

Upon the recently release of JavaFX 1.0, I became interested in exploring Scala's Swing cababilities.
I pefer a classical client-server application, as opposed to the ever popular web-based apps using AJAX as a rich content enabler.
So this is right up my alley.

JavaFX Script (the language used to create GUI applictions in JavaFX) seems nicer than many of the XML-base GUI DSLs (Microsoft Silverlight),
but I'm in the mist of learning Scala and this seems like a good problem to solve with Scala's DSL making features.

Fortunatly, someone has already done the heavy lifting and created a small, but useful layer on to top of Swing. It was recently
included in the lastest release of Scala (2.7.2), So here I go.

I stared with a generated maven archetype from the scala-tool.org repository

1 mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeCatalog=http://scala-tools.org

Then I add the folowing code the the App.scala file generated by the archetype:

 1 package org.samples.gui
 2 
 3 import scala.swing._
 4 import scala.swing.event._
 5 
 6 class App extends Applet {
 7 
 8     object ui extends UI with Reactor {
 9 
10         def init() = {
11 
12             val button = new Button {
13                 text = "Click me"
14             }
15 
16             val label = new Label {
17                 text = "Welcome to Hello, World Applet"
18             }
19 
20             contents = new BoxPanel(Orientation.Vertical) {
21                 contents += button
22                 contents += label
23                 border = Swing.EmptyBorder(30, 30, 10, 30)
24             }
25 
26             listenTo(button)
27 
28             reactions += {
29                 case ButtonClicked(b) => label.text = "Hello, World"
30             }
31         }
32     }
33 }

Next, I added an HTML file to my project (src/main/resources/App.html)

 1 <h1>Hello, World Applet</h1>
 2 
 3 <div>
 4 
 5     <applet width = "300" height = "100" code = "org.samples.gui.App.class"
 6 
 7         archive = "/home/erick/projects/samples-scala-gui/target/samples-scala-gui-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar,
 8                 /home/erick/.m2/repository/org/scala-lang/scala-library/2.7.2/scala-library-2.7.2.jar,
 9                 /home/erick/.m2/repository/org/scala-lang/scala-swing/2.7.2/scala-swing-2.7.2.jar">
10 
11         <strong>this browser does not understand java.</strong>
12 
13     </applet>
14 
15 </div>