Swing links of the week: October 21, 2007

October 21st, 2007 | 5 Comments »

Here are some Swing links that you might have missed during this week:

  • A three-part series by Eric Burke on do’s and do not’s of scroll panes. Read part 1, part 2 and part 3. A good rule of thumb would be to never use scroll panes for wrapping UI controls. Only use them for wrapping text areas, trees, lists and tables.
  • The first public tutorial on using AnimatedTransitions library by Nazmul Idris. Promised at this year’s JavaOne and covered in Filthy Rich Clients, this library is yet to see the light of the day (and hence the tutorial is a little unexpected). I’ve written on the subject of UI transitions before, questioning the usefulness of this technique; it still appears that this field draws a few “that’s interesting” but doesn’t go much farther than that. An interesting paper can be found in the Phosphor research project that puts some hard numbers on transitions usability.
  • Want to use Swing look-and-feels in Groovy 1.1 applications? Danno Ferrin shows you how.
  • SwingWorker gets some internal facelift in the latest Dolphin binaries, switching the thread pool implementation to the standard java.util.concurrent classes.
  • Matt Nathan has a first draft of the tutorial on JXComponent and XComponentUI classes. Combined with Jan Haderka‘s announcement on release 0.9 of SwingX (which coincided with the downtime for swinglabs.org), it shows that there is still some life in SwingX. Unfortunately, it still lacks well-defined release schedule and strong commitment from Sun to the development lifecycle and overall direction of the project.

5 Comments on “Swing links of the week: October 21, 2007”

  1. 1 Matt Nathan said at 6:14 am on October 22nd, 2007:

    Thanks for the link, much appreciated :)

  2. 2 Karl Peterbauer said at 2:33 pm on October 23rd, 2007:

    Thanks for the interesting weekly recaps!

  3. 3 Kirill Grouchnikov said at 8:49 pm on October 23rd, 2007:

    Matt, Karl

    Pleasure is all mine.

  4. 4 Chet Haase said at 12:26 pm on October 25th, 2007:

    Kirill: The release of the Animated Transitions library was indeed overdue (due to a protracted legal process to publish the source). But it is now out there and available at http://animatedtransitions.dev.java.net. There’s also an article/tutorial on the basic usage of the library (check out the link from the project main page).

    By the way, the link to the Filthy Rich Clients book site is wrong – I think you had a copy/paste error and ended up linking to Nazmul’s animtrans article again….

    Chet.

  5. 5 Kirill Grouchnikov said at 1:12 pm on October 25th, 2007:

    Chet – the link has been updated to point at the correct location.

    Thanks
    Kirill