Hacking J-Bird (Version 0.5.2): Some Guts for Developers

There are three dominant classes to J-Bird.

• MainFrame is the center of the graphical user interface. It is instantiated by the class JBird, which has a static main method. On Mac OS X, JBirdOSX is a subclass of JBird.



• JbirdDB provides access to the database. SQL and JDBC is mostly restricted to this class, although there are some exceptions in which I didn't know better at the time or in which it seemed much cheaper to return a ResultSet rather than to load data from a ResultSet into a data structure and return a data structure just for the sake of isolation.



• JTextEditor is a text editor that stands-by, hidden and waiting to pop up when text needs to be edited.

Two classes are available for testing. Both have main methods, and both should be ported to Junit.

• TestJB instantiates JbirdDB and provides an environment in which code that works with the database can be tested.



• TestDB is intended to test JDBC classes and methods that are used by J-Bird. It should test SQL constructs that are used in J-Bird, but those tests have not yet been implemented.

The builder has four dominant classes.

• JBBuildDB and provides the main method and provides the user interface. JBBuildDBOSX is a subclass of JBBuildDB that is used on Mac OS X.



• MasterICFactory generates successive components for the user interface.



• JBirdDBTools provides the guts used to read data and prepare it for the database.



• MasterListBuilder provides an interface to the database for building master lists.

J-Bird is intended to be internationalized. en_US resources are in the file resources.en_US. All classes of J-Bird that print to the graphical user interface have access to these resources. If you write code that prints to the interface, make an appropriate entry en resources.en_US and use it. The only part of J-Bird that currently fails to make use of internationalized resources is the print stream of the database builder.