Groovy and SwingBuilder

In my comparison of IronPython, Groovy and JRuby I used a "naked" Swing API to create a GUI application using Groovy. Groovy comes with a nice library called SwingBuilder that simplifies a lot of work with Swing. I couldn't find any documentation for SwingBuilder but the source code is pretty straight-forward. In my opinion, the best thing in the SwingBuilder version is the way you declare that a form has a button:

def frame = swing.frame(defaultCloseOperation: WC.EXIT_ON_CLOSE) {
  button('OK', actionPerformed: click)
}

You can pass a closure to the frame method.
I really like this way. It allows you to create your GUI in a more declarative way.

As was suggested by Martin C. Martin and Dierk Koenig (many thanks!) on the Groovy-user list, the code might look something like the following:

import javax.swing.WindowConstants as WC

click = { event ->
  event.source.text = "Pressed!"
}

def swing = new groovy.swing.SwingBuilder()
def frame = swing.frame(
  size: [200, 200],
  defaultCloseOperation: WC.EXIT_ON_CLOSE,
  title: 'Hello' ) {
     button('OK', actionPerformed: click)
}

frame.show() 

Iron Python on Balloons

Have you ever wondered how to create a simple application that uses balloons to notify about some events? Below is the result of my spike on how I could use IronPython and Windows Forms to create such thing.



Basically, it should:

1. show an icon in the system tray

NotifyIcon is a class that allows you to display an icon in the system tray.


2. display a tooltip every n milliseconds

It was easily achieved by using the notifyIcon.ShowBalloonTip method and the Timer (and its Tick event) class.


3. have a context menu that allows you to exit the application

The ContextMenu class.

Just paste the code to the Main.py file, prepare a test.ico file and run it with:

ipy Main.py

import clr

clr.AddReference("System.Windows.Forms")
clr.AddReference("System.Drawing")
from System.Drawing import Icon
from System.Windows.Forms import (Application, ContextMenu, 
                                  MenuItem, NotifyIcon, Timer)


class Main(object):

    def __init__(self):
        self.initNotifyIcon()
        timer = Timer()
        timer.Interval = 60000
        timer.Tick += self.onTick
        timer.Start()
    

    def initNotifyIcon(self):
        self.notifyIcon = NotifyIcon()
        self.notifyIcon.Icon = Icon("test.ico")
        self.notifyIcon.Visible = True
        self.notifyIcon.ContextMenu = self.initContextMenu()

    
    def onTick(self, sender, event):
        self.notifyIcon.BalloonTipTitle = "Hello, I'm IronPython"
        self.notifyIcon.BalloonTipText = "Who are you?"
        self.notifyIcon.ShowBalloonTip(1000)

        
    def initContextMenu(self):
        contextMenu = ContextMenu()
        exitMenuItem = MenuItem("Exit")
        exitMenuItem.Click += self.onExit
        contextMenu.MenuItems.Add(exitMenuItem)
        return contextMenu
        

    def onExit(self, sender, event):
        self.notifyIcon.Visible = False
        Application.Exit()     
   
        
if __name__ == "__main__":
    main = Main()
    Application.Run()

Update:Marcin shows how to achieve the same with Groovy.