A recent project at work required building a multi-step dialog to manage the interface between a user and an expert system (and some fairly advanced NLP to boot). On the surface this looked like a fairly standard Wizard problem – design a bunch of screens with questions, and then collect the answers as the user proceeded through the dialogs. However, the Wizard APIs I found were either not very mature or (in the case of the Java.net Wizards) it was very difficult to create complex branching behaviors, and those branches were extremely resistant to change. Both things are essentially show-stoppers when working with prototypes that frequently need modification.

In the end, I spent a weekend and a couple evenings building a new Wizard API for Java, called CJWizard. The library is released under the Apache V.2 license, so it should work for just about anything you want to use it for. I would like to know if you’re using it, and what you’re using it for, just to sate my own curiosity :). The project is hosted on code.google.com, so please submit issues, and feel free to contribute to the project.

CJWizard provides the structure needed to quickly create simple dialogs by implementing an abstract class (WizardPage) for each page of the dialog, and adding them to a PageFactory that can generate pages on-demand, as they are required. This puts the programmer in full control of how the wizard proceeds. The CJWizard architecture also makes it easy to add a wizard to an existing application (either via an additional JDialog, or embedding in some other component), and/or insert custom wrapper widgets around the dialog pages–meaning that you can quickly add customized navigational controls aside from the standard Previous/Next/Finish/Cancel buttons.

Some aspects were taken from the Java.Net wizard API, such as auto-detecting named components, and automatically collecting the values from them, but CJWizard takes a much simpler approach (and in some ways, a less powerful one – CJWizard does not listen to every key event, only collecting values when the user navigates away from a WizardPage). In most cases, you only need to name widgets prior to adding them to the WizardPage, and their values will be collected in a settings map automatically.

CJWizard was meant to provide a flexible way to generate professional-looking multi-step dialogs very quickly.