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

• Dave Gilbert of JFreeChart project follows in the footsteps of Google Chart and provides a servlet that generates embeddable chart images for web applications. While not strictly relevant to Swing, it employs the same approach as outlined by Jacobus Steenkamp in this article from java.net – using Swing as backend to generate images to be displayed in web pages.
• Ramon Ramos has announced a NetBeans plugin that installs the Synthetica look and feel with matching delegates for custom NetBeans components (editor tabs, viewer tabs and sliding buttons). The plugin itself can be downloaded here, and while the sources are not publicly available, it appears that it uses internal Synthetica APIs to paint the relevant component visuals. Before using this module in your NetBeans RCP applications, make sure that you comply with the licensing terms of Synthetica itself – while the declared license of the plugin is “Netbeans”, some Synthetica skins can not be used without a commercial license. This marks the third look-and-feel plugin for NetBeans after Substance and Napkin.
• JIDE Software has announced the second major update to JIDE Desktop Application Framework (JDAF). I would really like to see David and his team to have regular updates to the company blog, showcasing their excellent products
• Eric Burke writes on a more compact way to fire property change events on Swing components. I jumped the gun a little too early in the comments, and his implementation is correct. The compactness sacrifices the readability a little, and i think that i still would prefer the usual way.
• Sun started (a potentially long) wave of announcements leading to the Update N and JavaFX this week at JavaPolis with the Scene Graph project. Geertjan has a small example over at this Javalobby thread, but i am much more interested to see how this will be supported in the JavaFX designer tool chain. Obviously, the designer must support visual editing and creating the JavaFX code / matching scene graph in the underlying code. But will it be able to go the other way around – be able to parse a Java class with scene graph definition and show the resulting scene at design time? Or even better, will it be able to parse an arbitrary scene graph definition, or still have the same “guarded” blocks in NetBeans?
• The second announcement from Sun is about the all-Java PDF renderer project. It’s quite illuminating to read the comments on the original announcement and this Javalobby thread. The most interesting part of the project page reads: “The PDF Renderer currently supports a subset 1.4 of the PDF specification. It does not support transparency, various font encodings or fill-in forms. These are the first features we hope the community will tackle“. Applying the usual rules of “it takes 90% of the time to get the first 90% of the features, and then the rest 90% of the time to get the rest 10% of the features”, these are obviously not the easiest parts of the spec (which is not even the latest spec). Will it follow in the footsteps of Flying Saucer, providing support for only a subset of the (quite big) spec? Will it follow in the footsteps of SwingX, with the community finally stepping in after more than two years since the project inception? Hopefully, this will not result in the same fallout as the announcement of SwingX painters, the bitter reaction of WingZ developers and the eventual closing of ZValley company.