The goal of Flamingo project is to provide a small and cohesive set of powerful UI components with functionality similar to or superseding that of Vista Explorer and Office 2007. Command bar is one of the more complicated UI components in the Office 2007, and Flamingo’s JRibbon is the all-Java implementation of this component. It is already being used by a number of projects which provide valuable feedback on the missing parts and help in prioritizing their development. Recently, i have added two user-requested features to the JRibbon – modifying the contents of in-ribbon galleries and support for contextual tabs.

The documentation of JRibbon has been updated to bring it in-sync with the latest 3.1dev branch. If you’re new to this component, start with the overview and then delve into the specifics of each one of the ribbon’s building blocks.

• Ribbon overview.
• Ribbon bands.
• Ribbon tasks.
• Contextual task groups.
• Ribbon creation.
• Ribbon resizing.

To read more on modifying the contents of in-ribbon galleries scroll down to the “Dynamically changing gallery content” section in the ribbon bands page. To read about contextual task group, first read the page on creating a task group and then read the “Working with contextual task groups” section of the ribbon creation page.

Here is a screenshot of a ribbon with selected contextual tab. Note the vertical lines that separate the tasks in the two contextual groups. Also note the different background colorization of the task toggle tab and the top portion of the ribbon – this is done to provide visual indication that the currently selected task is a contextual one.

This marks the last new features for the version 3.1 of Flamingo. You’re more than welcome to download the latest 3.1dev drop and try it in your applications. The release candidate for Flamingo 3.1 is scheduled on September 1 with the final release scheduled on September 15. Click on the button below to launch a demo of JRibbon component in action (requires Java 6).