Profile Management Framework

Question

I am developing an application in Java Swing and i have a requirement that i should be able to store some UI related User Preferences locally on client's machine. Some of these preferences could be,
1) To store the last appearance of a table in the application( things like column width, column by which the table was sorted) and to restore the table with same look and feel.
2) To always open the application with the module( a particular window) preferred by the user.
Well, i can always achieve this by writing tons of code. But, I was wondering if Core Java or any of its extensions provide some framework for this purpose so that i can go about my job in a seamless manner. To be more precise, I am looking for some API for UI profile management.
Any ideas/pointers are welcome. Even a reference to a 3rd Party API will be of great help !
-Ganesh

Answer 1

I am trying to do something very similar to this. I recently looked into the Preferences API that comes with JDK 1.4, but we chose a JTree paradigm for our application. Basically what this means is that for most of the nodes, the right panel will display a table/grid. We plan on storing the table layout similar to what you want to do, but this has to be specific to each separate node. That will in turn be a lot of data and the preferences API is not recommended for this.
The other option is to use properties files, but the name/value pair might not be flexible enough.
Finally, we're looking into using XML. The idea being to write an XML configuration file that stores all of the prefernces information. Still need to do further research, but if I find something, will let you know. Do the same.
Wasif