As I promised in April, I am now publishing the results from a debate that I started on the UIDesign.net discussion list. Thanks to all of those who contributed. The content of this article has also appeared in Swing by Matt Robinson and Pavel Vorobiev. This is a taste of the UI Guidelines from the book. Due to my exposure to Java in recent years this article is particularly relevant to Java JFC developers but should be useful for Windows, Motif and Mac developers too.
Tree is a very powerful and sophisticated Swing component.
It can often be used for the display, navigation, and editing of hierarchical data. Hierarchical data is, by its very nature, complex and the Swing JTree component is also complex. Care must be taken when selecting to use a Tree in a UIDesign and further care must be taken when selecting which of the many facilities to utilise for a given domain problem. Earlier Advice I first turned to the books on my shelf when thinking about Tree usability guidelines. So not much there but a hint that using Tree is difficult and problematic.