How to Create a Flickr Search in Java Swing

The tooling support that NetBeans IDE 6.0 has for JSR-296 is really awesome. There's so much of it. To get myself up to speed, I went through this demo, which gets you a nice application for searching Flickr.

Here's the result:

The above is a pic taken at JavaOne last year, of myself, and my fellow authors of the book 'Rich Client Programming: Plugging into the NetBeans Platform'.

The best parts of what the Flickr demo shows are, in my opinion:

• The ready-to-run application framework that the New Project wizard creates.
• The checkbox that generates code for executing a method on the EDT. Really cool.
• The setting in the Properties window that connects the text field's action to the method that searches for the image.
• The seamless integration with Java Web Start via a few clicks in the project's customizer.

The sheer range of tools provided is really cool. It makes the prototype or draft phase of application development a point-and-click activity. Probably the best thing is how all the tooling that the IDE provides really pulls all the theory of JSR-296 out of the dry specification and into the world of the real.