Easily create a wizard, as in in a very popular Operating Systems.

With this component you can easily create a wizard, much like the wizards used in a very popular O$.

If you are not Java developer, then you shouldn't be so interested with this project. You can not use it 'as is'. You have to write first a little application (or applet) if you want to use it. It serves only 'library' purposes.

You are free to use it in your programs anyway you like, as long as you write my name to the credits part. Furthermore, you should read the licence agreement (file docs/lgpl.html - see file COPYING), which is under the GNU GPL.

This component serves as an interface between you and a wizard-like frame. It means that you can create a wizard with the least effort from you, which will be functional and as close as possible to the wizard used in a "commercial Operating $ystem".

The component itself takes care of creating the interface, applying the buttons, move between the pages, displaying a picture and informing your application about the current state of the wizard. Some of these features are:

• automatically creates a frame with all the neccesary information and components, like the buttons to navigate through the pages, the layout manager, the position of all the components etc. The programmer needs only to inform the wizard of the inserted components and everything else is done automatically.
• handles the events of the various buttons, so that the programmer doesn't need to manually change pages in the wizard.
• displays a picture on the left of the wizard window. The only thing the programmer has to do is give the filename of the picture to be loaded.
• the programmer can easily define the number of pages of a wizard and if the user can exit normally from this page.
• the programmer is informed whenever a change of the current wizard page is done.
• ability to display a little help message for every wizard page. Still experimental.
• it supports both applets and applications, with the same compiled / source code.
• it includes a new component: the browseButton. This is a button attached to a textfield. If you click on the button a file dilog appears. The filename chosen appears in the textfield.
• Interface driven event - with WizardListener. Not anymore event driven.
• Java 1.1 compatible. Dropped the deprecated functions. Sorry Java 1.0 developers! (If you still think that you need Java 1.0 compatibility search for version 0.8.x)
• No need for the parent class to be only an applet. Now it can be whatever you like.
• Every page can have it's own picture, or all pages can have the same
  picture.
• Interactive Wizard is now possible! Not needed anymore to be a serial wizard. You can define various data-paths for your wizard. You can jump
  from one page to another.

You can find some info in the docs directory. In order to create this directory you have to enter 'src' and on the command prompt type 'make docs'.

The docs directory is created on the same directory as this README file. The directory 'docfiles' under the 'src' directory DOES NOT contain any useful info (Btw thanks to GIMP for the construction of the gif files!).

Information for the installation is in the file 'INSTALL'.

The Wizard can't be closed with the "close" button of the window manager (or the "X" button in win95). It SHOULD me closed either with "Cancel" or "Finish".

This version is not compatible with older versions of this component. Changes have been made to WizardListener interface. Also the wizButton class has been removed from the package. The Java 1.1 supports a new event handling, which makes the need of such a component not useful. Sorry for the inconvenience, but I think that this had to be done. Although the same event module supports event handling of closed-frames, the old traping event of wizard listener is kept.

Thank you for downloading this file :-)

Happy programming!