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Autocomplete Text box with Document Listener in Java

I'm trying to make an autocomplete textbox for a program I'm writing. I have the logic down, but I'm having some trouble implementing it properly. First I tried it with a key listener, but that solution was a bit strange in the way that it handled multiple key presses at the same time. Then I tried DocumentListener which was far better, but doesn't allow me to edit the document from within the Listener because of a threading issue. I read something about DocumentFilter, but I can't find a single guide on how to use it. Is there a way of editing the doc from with documentListener? Or would you recommend DocumentFilter and if so, how do you use it??

DocumentListener should not be used to edit the document. Doing so would require a call to SwingUtilities.invokeLater(...) and since DocumentListener detects changes to the document, any edits would result in an infinite loop. Best bet is to use DocumentFilter.

manual swing data binding

I have rather big swing interface (several textboxes, comboboxes, checkboxes, custom popup dialogs etc) and a data model that has to be changed when ui control changes: new text is entered into text box, check box is clicked, etc.
The question is: what is the best practice to organize update+validation of input values.
Unfortunately I can not use binding framework like beansbinding.

Add appropriate listeners to the components, and update the model when the events are fired.
Or design your UI so that everything is saved to the model only when a Save or OK button is clicked. This also helps with validation, because you just need to validate everything at once, when the button is clicked.

Combine the answer of JB Nizet with validation in your components, for example by using JFormattedTextField (or an enhanced version of this). You can use the JFormattedTextField also as editor for JComboBox instances. You can add validation to JSlider instances.
In short, provide immediate feedback to the user when he types in an invalid value. That combined with validation on the model side makes a good application.
This can be compared to a modern website: client-side validation with javascript to give the user immediate feedback + server-side validation for validation which does not go through the UI, or to avoid nasty users bypassing your client-side validation

Code/text folding in SWING

I'm looking for a way to provide 'text folding' capabilities to a swing JTextArea or JTextPane
More specifically, I want to add a block of data in a text component and I want the component to display only some header line. Then the user can unfold the block by clicking some icon. This is just like the code folding feature in most IDE.
I've found ->some sample code<- after some thorough search, but the mechanisms used here are quite obscure to me and it stops working when I try to remove text from the document.
Maybe using XML as input could be a lead ?

This one how to add collapsible area
http://java-sl.com/collapse_area.html
This one how to represent XML
http://java-sl.com/xml_editor_kit.html

I would start by looking at the NetBeans API: http://bits.netbeans.org/dev/javadoc/org-netbeans-modules-editor-fold/overview-summary.html
If you were to do it yourself, you'd need to provide a Document implementation that makes the JTextComponent think that pieces are being added or removed, then attach click events that tell the document to update itself. A lot of work.
Visually, it may also be better to use JEditorPane, but that's probably more work.

Looking for an efficient Java Swing based console

I'm looking for a highly efficient Swing Java component which I can just plug into my application UI. I already tried using the classes within Swing such as JTextArea with no avail; they simply aren't high-performance enough and have any crippling drawbacks. Additionally, it'd be nice if it had standard console features such as scroll-lock, clear console, colours, and so on.
Edit: Forgot to say, this console will have a lot of debug information streaming into it, and it needs to be fully scrollable.
Cheers,
Chris

I fail to see what is wrong with using a JTextPane. It supports attributes which you can specify as each piece of text is added to the console. Clearing it is also obviously a no brainer. When added to a scroll pane it also supports scrolling.
You can add scroll locking by using Smart Scrolling.
Plus, it removes text too early and
No idea what that means as text is never removed unless you specifically remove it from the document.
doesn't allow the user to scroll while
input is being entered (afaik). The
effect is that you just see text
flashing while the number of rows
remains the same.
By default the text scrolls automatically as text is append to the document assuming the code is executed on the EDT. This scrolling can be controlled the the example provided in the link above.
Edit:
but I'd still like a library solution
I don't know of any
auto-colourise text coming from
different streams
The Message Console might give you some ideas.
(i.e., detect [error] prefix on a
line) and colourise lines based on
this)
This is easily done by adding a DocumentFilter to the Document of the text pane. You can add attributes as text is inserted into the Document.

Be sure that you read about the Event Dispatching Thread (EDT) in swing!
BTW: a simple search 'java swing console' will give you a lots of hints OR you could use/adapt the beanshell textfield which is a jtextfield too ...

How can I create an AutoComplete popup in a JTextPane in Java?

I am creating a SQL editor. I am using JTextPane for the editor. I want to implement AutoCompletion for table name etc. like Eclipse.

I think the appropriate class for displaying info on top of another component is JPopupMenu, which already handles layering correctly to display itself. JPopupMenu has a show() method that takes its 'parent' component as an argument, and it will show itself in that component's coordinate space. Since you want to display a selection of terms for the user to choose from, a menu seems appropriate.
To check for text changes, you'd add a DocumentListener to the document that's wrapped by the JTextPane; you can access it using getDocument().
To find out where the cursor (actually, the caret) is, you can use getCaretPosition(). That returns the caret's position within the text stream as an int. You can use modelToView() to translate that position to actual (x,y) coordinates. That in turn will tell you where to show your menu.
You can use addKeyListener() to catch keyboard events on your JTextPane, like hitting Ctrl-Space.
The combination of all that should allow you to do what you're looking to do.

You can also use http://fifesoft.com/autocomplete/. You can install it on any JTextComponent.

For things like this you probably should consider layered panes so your auto-complete suggestions appear in the correct place and z-order.
Furthermore you will have to look for changes in the JTextPane to know when the user is typing and you will need a parser that understands what is typed so you can offer the feature only at appropriate points.
It's not quite clear what exactly your problem is and what you got so far.

I achieved this by adding a key listener to the JTextPane and checking for CTRL + Space keystrokes. When the appropriate key combo was detected the listener went off and looked up the list of possible matches based on the characters directly to the left of the cursor at the time of the key press and found the best matches and displayed them to the user in a JPopup. If there was an exact match then it simply replaced the partial text with the match. If no matches were found an option was given to the user to add the text that they had already typed, edit it and record it into the list of acceptable data.

We use jide. They have a lot of components that help you do this kind of thing really easily