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

• Daniel Spiewak walks through the steps of creating a simple form, from sketching the design on a piece of paper to implementing it in code. Personally, i felt that the recommendation to select the layout that the specific developer feels comfortable with is not very good for long-term maintainability, and the team would be much better off with a solid and well-known third-party layout manager such as FormLayout. Not to mention that the resolution independence is a very important topic which should not be dismissed lightly.
• Wim Deblauwe writes about the intricacies of providing responsive UIs with SwingWorker, using a very basic and common scenario of wiring a progress listener to a long background task.
• On a related subject, Carl from Palantir dives into the SwingUtilities.invokeAndWait and its behavior in thread interruption scenarios.
• Thierry Lefort continues his explorations of table-based data visualisation techniques, using the JXTable component from SwingX component suite to provide filtering and highlighting capabilities. The second part uses a color utilities class to provide distinctive highlighting on selected cells.
• Tim Dalton posts an update on the progress of his SQUIB project that provides Scala bindings for Swing components. Reading the code examples on his efforts in Scala and the parallel efforts in Groovy i can’t help but think it is still not much more than syntactic sugar. Indeed, you save a few constructs here and there (which is not necessarily a good thing, at least in the short run). I’m not really sure what am i expecting, but i’m definitely lacking a “wow” factor, so to speak. Something that would make me want to switch to Groovy or Scala for my hobby dabblings in UI technologies.
• Jan Erik Paulsen has a teaser on the new application that he is working on in Teppefall Labs. Called Teppefall Capture, it allows capturing pictures and videos from an attached (web) camera. He rightfully mentions the abysmal state of affairs with respect to anything remotely related to video, and hopefully this situation will be addressed this year. My number one Java desktop wish for 2008 – where art thou?
• Chet Haase has announced that he left the Swing-land to work on Flex SDK. Personally, i wish him nothing but the best, and hope that he will have the same level of passion once the initial excitement over the new technology wears out.