Chapter 11. Wizards
This chapter covers
Today, most people are familiar with the concept of an application providing a wizard for certain tasks. By separating a complex task into a series of steps, performed one at a time, it’s possible to condense an otherwise intimidating set of options into a relatively pleasant end-user experience. A good example can be found in Eclipse when creating a new project. Eclipse supports development in a wide variety of languages, and each of those languages has many different options that can be configured for a new project. Rather than dump you straight into a dialog box filled with combo boxes, text-entry fields, and checkboxes, however, Eclipse guides you through the process of creating a new project one step at a time. You can choose the language for your new project, then a location, and then configure language-specific settings. Eclipse can infer sensible defaults for most of these options; any time after you’ve provided the bare minimum of information, you can click the Finish button to tell the program to go ahead with creating the project. If you choose to configure details yourself, you can freely move back and forth between steps, changing choices you made earlier. The whole experience is made enjoyable because you can see what effects your choices have before they’re made permanent.