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

• Jacek Furmankiewicz posted a series of three entries on builders for Swing layout managers. The first entry shows two prototypes for wrapping Mig layout manager in a Java builder, the second entry explores a more WYSIWYG approach (which looks like a simplified version of ZoneLayout, since the example itself is also very simple), and the last entry tackles a more complicated example of ZoneLayout. Personally, the use of white space to drive the layout does not sound like the best idea. It’s hard to debug (make, anyone?), it’s prone to whitespace / tab conversion problems, and it poses significant challenges to refactoring control names.
• Anthony Goubard posts a few screenshots of new demo applications created for 6u10 version of JDK. As mentioned last week, these are SwingSet3 and Laffy. The bundled demo folder has a simple HTML page for each one of the projects that point to the actual java.net content. SwingSet3 is now publicly available, and you can run the WebStart version here. Hopefully Laffy‘s homepage will be updated soon.
• Geertjan Wielenga has a short tutorial on using Spring framework for building Swing applications. The usual pains of Spring approach apply, and that would include compile-time errors moved to runtime, tons of XML wiring for anything but sample applications (which also needs to be edited manually in most IDEs and is hard to refactor) and a few dependency jar.
• Robert O’Connor rounds up the comparison of the three Java closures proposals with an example of applying CICE to a sample Swing application. I don’t really agree with Robert’s point that the main problem with Java is its verbosity. I think that the biggest pain point of Swing (at least for beginners) is the over-flexibility of Swing API and lack of “the true way” to achieve a specific functionality. And the second one is lack of video capabilities, which would hopefully be addressed at this year’s JavaOne (see below).
• Nazmul Idris is back with the first part of tutorial on his new Task API for Swing applications.
• The OpenJDK Innovators’ Challenge has announced the finalists, and both UI-related proposals are in. Congratulations to Clemens Eisserer, Roman Kennke and Mario Torre.

The session catalog for JavaOne 2008 has been published, and it has quite a few desktop-related technical and bird-of-feather sessions. Out of the entire Desktop track and Rich Media track, here are a few interesting sessions:

• TS-6649 / Desktop Track Overview & New Features in the upcoming Java 6u10 Platform by Hans Muller and Ethan Nicholas. This might hold some interesting news for the Java desktop developers, especially in light of BOS-6511 and TS-6509.
• TS-6611 / Filthy-Rich Clients: Filthier, Richer, Clientier by Romain Guy and Chet Haase.
• BOF-6511 / The Java Media Components API BOF.
• BOF-5037 / High-Resolution Monitors: Make Your User Interfaces Scale with the Future by Mike Swingler and I.
• TS-6609 / Using JavaFX Script To Build Swing Applications by Amy Fowler and Hans Muller.
• TS-6929 / Creating a Compelling User Experience by Ben Galbraith.
• BOF-6101 / Nimbus: Beyond the Basics by Richard Bair and Jasper Potts.
• TS-6096 / Nimbus: The New Face of Swing by Richard Bair and Jasper Potts.
• TS-6656 / Extreme GUI Makeover: Swing Meets FX by Christophe Campbell and Shannon Hickey.
• TS-5500 / The Desktop Java Lovers Survival Guide by Joe Winchester.
• TS-6509 / Incorporating Media into JavaFX™ and Java™ Technology-Based Applications by Marc Owerfeldt and Tony Wyant.

Please browse through the entire session catalog for more desktop-related presentations by my friends Alexander, David, Richard, Andres, Mikael and more.