The breadcrumb bar component from the Flamingo component suite has been mentioned a few times in the past, and now the official documentation has been reworked to reflect the current stable APIs. Here i will give a short overview of some of the main features.

Breadcrumb bar is a modern component that plays important part in Windows Vista Explorer and many web sites. It allows the user to keep track of his location within a program or document, efficiently utilizing the available screen estate. In the following screenshot, the file viewer panel is driven by the breadcrumb bar that navigates the local file system:

Breadcrumb bar can be used for navigating any tree-based structure, such as an SVN repository. In addition, Flamingo provides a utility class that wraps an existing JTree or TreeModel and exposes it as a breadcrumb bar with little additional programming. Here is the list of available implementations:

The org.jvnet.flamingo.bcb.BreadcrumbBar is the base class that provides the skeleton implementation of breadcrumb bar component. The org.jvnet.flamingo.bcb.core package provides specific implementations targeting a few popular structures. These are:

• BreadcrumbFileSelector for traversing a local file system.
• BreadcrumbSvnSelector for traversing a local or remote SVN repository.
• BreadcrumbMultiSvnSelector for traversing a number of local or remote SVN repositories.
• BreadcrumbTreeAdapterSelector for wrapping an existing JTree or TreeModel.

The detailed documentation has more information on wiring the core breadcrumb bar components to other application panels and on implementing a custom breadcrumb bar.