Swing links of the week: December 7, 2008

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

• Gregg Bolinger combines two projects, JavaBuilders and client-objects, to enable automatic data-binding in YAML-driven Swing and SWT applications.
• InfoQ’s Charles Humble shares his thoughts on SwingX and core Swing in his followup to my earlier entry.
• The client heavyweight Joe Winchester wonders whether Swing should provide a way to automatically detect and flag long-running I/O operations that are blocking the UI thread. While i showed techniques for tracing long-running EDT operations before, Swing (and any other UI toolkit, as a matter of fact) could benefit greatly by making sure that programmers don’t shoot themselves in the foot. SWT does this to some extent by throwing exceptions on any UI related operation happening outside the UI thread. Substance closes some of the core Swing gaps by throwing runtime exceptions on component creation and some model changes – a move that has so far generated the most user resistance.
• Eugene Ryzhikov shares a tip on minimizing maintenance of table models.
• Piet Blok dives deeper into the JXLayer project and shows how to use it to create a generic ZoomUI functionality.
• Ken Orr keeps the promise and has started a series on skinning the scroll bar component.

Quite a few releases announced this week:

• Richard Kennard has published a LiveDemo of his MetaWidget project that allows you to start playing and coding with the project.
• Deane Richan has announced the availability of HTML TableLayout project that was previously part of the Xito Dialog project. It is rather unfortunate that (as usual) the comments section quickly degenerates into “i prefer” discussion of other layout managers.
• Manuel Kaess has published AlbumPlayer, a new cross-platform Swing-based media player.
• Clemens Eisserer has released version 0.6 of his JXRenderMark benchmark to measure the performance of his XRender pipeline for accelerating Java2D performance.
• Jean Francois Poilpret has announced the final release 1.0 of the DesignGridLayout project.
• Alex Ruiz has announced release candidate for version 1.0 of FEST-Swing UI testing library.

Devoxx 2008 has started today, and it has a few Swing related presentations:

• Jeanette Winzenburg on SwingX
• Richard Bair and Jan Haderka on SwingLabs
• Alexander Potochkin on JXLayer
• Maxim Zakharenkov on Swing Explorer
• James Williams on Griffon
• David Gilbert on JFreeChart
• Michael Huttermann on UI testing

With not a single feature from my JavaFX “look forward to” list available in the first release, it’s time to see what Sun is going to announce at Devoxx. Over the last few weeks there has been significant (in number of dozens) amount of submitted and closed bug reports in integration between heavyweight and lightweight components for the first two builds of 6u12. Risking yet another prediction (the one about JDK / module / OSGi was quite right, and the main discrepancies are already being criticized by the OSGi community), i would say that the web browser component is in the works, but as a heavyweight implementation. This would require closer cooperation with the (lightweight) rest of the UI toolkit. Share your thoughts in the comments.