Desktop Applications: Architectural Frameworks?

Question

I'm wondering if there are any architectural frameworks out there to create desktop or standalone applications, in Java or C# for instance. It seems that there are tons of them available for web applications but I can't find many good resources on frameworks or architectural best-practices for desktop development.

Ideally I would like to know if there is any source code available of desktop applications that would be considered to have a good architecture or are built with a certain framework.

Answer 1

While not directly related to desktop applications if you are looking for decent source code for well written projects I asked a similar question:

Open source C# projects that have extremely high code quality to learn from.

People gave some pretty good suggestions there:

• Scott Hanselman's The Weekly Source Code series (usually managed C#)
• Code written by Microsoft Patterns & Practices team.
• SharpDevelop (written in C#)
• Mono (most of the framework in C#)
• Paint.Net (written in C#)
• NHibernate (written in C#)
• The Castle Project (written in C#)
• xUnit (written in C#)
• .Net Framework Source Code

Answer 2

In the lightweight app category, JSR 296 for Java (to be in future Java 7 possibly) is a framework handling the basics like resource management and actions. Lots of links here:

• http://tech.puredanger.com/java7#jsr296

Scaling up a bit, you could look at various RCP frameworks like:

• Eclipse RCP: http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Rich_Client_Platform
• NetBeans Platform: http://www.netbeans.org/products/platform/
• Spring RCP: http://spring-rich-c.sourceforge.net/1.0.0/index.html
• Comparison article: http://www.infoq.com/news/eclipse-rcp-netbeans-platform

UPDATE: It has been mentioned (by Mark Reinhold at Devoxx '08) that JSR 296 will be included in Java 7.

Further update: JSR 296 is dead. JavaFX is the current direction for client-side Java.