objectview

A Swing library for rendering, searching, and virtualizing large collections of structured objects — through one small SPI. Implement Viewable on your own type and objectview gives you painted cards, live search/sort, reference-chip navigation, and a virtualized list that stays smooth at tens of thousands of objects.

It carries almost no baggage: its entire dependency footprint is slf4j-api (logging facade — you supply the binding) and jackson-databind (view-config JSON). Images are rendered by the JDK; SVG and image-blurring are delegated to optional host-registered SPIs, so there is no heavy image-toolkit dependency.

Quickstart

Make any class renderable by implementing Viewable (here via the reflection base ViewableAdapter, so public fields become card rows):

public final class Book extends ViewableAdapter {
    public String title;
    public String author;
    public int year;
    public Book sequelTo;                 // a reference — renders as a clickable chip

    @Override public String getIdentifier()  { return title; }
    @Override public String getDisplayName() { return title; }
}

MultiView view = new MultiView();
view.addSection("Books", Book.class, List.of(a, b));
view.build(1);                            // drop `view` (a JComponent) into any JFrame

Reference fields (sequelTo, or a List<Book>) render as chips that scroll to and flash the target's card. See objectview.demo.Quickstart for the full runnable version.

What you get

• Cards — each object painted as a card of typed field rows (text, numbers, links, images, references), with selectable/copyable text.
• Search & sort — a live search bar over the current set, with per-field configuration (ViewConfig) and match highlighting.
• Virtualization — VirtualizedCardList builds only the cards on screen, so 100k+ objects load in under a second and jumps/searches stay instant.
• Reference navigation — entity-valued fields become chips that navigate to the referent's card across views sharing a RenderContext.
• Grouping/faceting — build group trees from facet declarations (objectview.facet, objectview.group).

The SPI

• objectview.Viewable — the one interface a host object implements: getIdentifier(), getDisplayName(), typeName(), and fields() (a FieldSet). ViewableAdapter provides a reflection-based default (public fields → rows); or supply a map-backed FieldSet for dynamic objects.
• objectview.utils.swing.SvgRasterizer — optional. Register a rasterizer to display SVG images; without one, raster formats still work.
• objectview.media.ImageBlurrer — optional. Register a policy to blur answer-revealing images (e.g. for quiz apps); default is no-op.

Examples

Runnable demos in objectview.demo:

demo	shows
Quickstart	the 30-second example above
SearchDemo	live search, sort, field highlight + bulk expand/collapse toolbar
MultiViewDemo	two views sharing a context; click a chip to navigate between them
RenderBenchmark [count]	scale — 100,000 rich cards

Benchmark numbers (100,000 cards, each with several fields + a reference chip + a collection of chips) on a laptop:

generate 285 ms · register 54 ms · build 923 ms · jump-to-last 82 ms · search 52 ms · heap ~75 MB

Build & use

Requires JDK 17 or later.

mvn install          # build, test, install to your local Maven repo

<dependency>
    <groupId>io.github.ggyepesi</groupId>
    <artifactId>objectview</artifactId>
    <version>1.0.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
</dependency>

You also need an slf4j binding at runtime (objectview only depends on the API), e.g. org.slf4j:slf4j-simple.

License

Apache License 2.0.

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objectview began as the rendering layer of a larger Wikidata quiz-building application and was extracted into a standalone, dependency-light library.