Swing links of the week: October 12, 2008
Here are some Swing links that you might have missed during the last week:
- James Britt has an article on IBM.com developerWorks site on developing JRuby Swing applications with Monkeybars library.
- Jean Francois Poilpret continues tackling the more intricate problems with layout managers. This week he analyzes the real-time resizing of different components, including sliders, tables and scroll panes.
- Mikael Grev promises imminent availability of WebStart version of his media player. Currently hehas no plans to open-source the implementation, but the reasoning (no need for outside help) seems a little peculiar. I have repeatedly found over the past years that even if i am the sole developer on the project, it is the user feedback that is driving the project forward.
- David Benson has announced the initial beta release of JGraph X Swing diagramming library.
- Following the announcements on the Griffon project, Andres Almiray has updated the JideBuilder and GraphicsBuilder projects. JideBuilder 2.0 and GraphicsBuilder 0.6.1 are now under Griffon umbrella.
- Ken Orr writes about image-based method to create non-rectangular active (clickable) areas for Swing buttons. While this technique has its merits (splitting the work between the designers and developers is one such example), the needs of modern UIs render it somewhat obsolete. Such aspects as support for High DPI mode, skinning and animations require more advanced solutions.
- And finally, while not strictly Swing related, this might be of an interest to the readers. PulpCore is a new 2D rendering and animation framework for the Java applets available at Google Code repository under BSD license. Milpa is an example of PulpCore-based applet game, and it has all the characteristics of a browser-oriented game. It loads fast, has a lot of animations and is very responsive.
October 13th, 2008 at 11:01 am
I was really surprised when I came across PulpCore. The startup/launch experience is actually…pleasant. That, and they made some really nice, clean-looking demos (love that fade-in PulpCore logo when Milpa starts up). I think this should be a wake-up call to the JavaFX Script team: none of their demos come close to being so nice a user experience. And Milpa was actually fun to play.
October 13th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
Kirill, why is that a peculiar argument? I can still get user feedback. Running it as an Open Source project cost extra resources and since I don’t need help with the coding why would I pay those costs?
It’s not like I don’t know about Open Source and what it takes and gives. MiGLayout is BSD and quite popular… The reason that MiGLayout is open source is for people to do ports, which they do, and so it can get into the JDK/SWT/Whatever.
Cheers,
Mikael
October 13th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Mikael,
Access to source code allows people not only to report bugs, but also suggest fixes. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to incorporate the fix as suggested, but in some cases it can spare you valuable time in hunting down the cause of the bug. It doesn’t mean that you need to grant write access to anybody, but granting read access is certainly beneficial.
Thanks
Kirill
October 14th, 2008 at 12:24 am
Kirill, the benefit of maybe getting a suggestion about how to change my source code to fix a bug will not outweigh the cost of setting it up as an open source project since this is a product targeting normal users and not developers. If it was targeting developers the cost might have been worth it.
October 22nd, 2008 at 6:44 am
Mikael, if you’re using let’s say Google Code the overhead of setting up an OSS project is let’s say…half an hour tops. Just a suggestion, I respect your work greatly and you are free to do with it whatever you feel is right, open sourcing or not.