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

• Jacek Furmankiewicz has announced the first beta release 0.1 of his SwingBuilder project. It provide support for data binding with Beans Binding, layout management with MigLayout, validation with Apache Commons Validator, long running tasks with SwingWorker and has integration libraries for JIDE and SwingX.
• Maxim Zakharenkov has released version 1.2 of the Swing Explorer tool for debugging Swing applications. Eclipse support is a welcome addition, and in fact i would warmly recommend rewriting the entire UI as a collection of Eclipse views. In my experience, Eclipse is a great scaffolding for exactly this kind of information presentation, taking away a lot of implementation complexity and leaving you with implementing your actual logic. As long as you don’t fight it and try to go against the “Eclipse way” of doing things, you’ll find it a very mature and rich platform. In addition, learning another UI toolkit (SWT) is not a bad thing.
• Collin Fagan writes about using tooltips to show preview of tabs in a tabbed pane. Users of Substance look-and-feel had access to this functionality for quite some time now, and Collin shows how this can be done in a cross-LAF way.
• Ayman Al-Sairafi is working on the JSyntaxPane component that provides a text control with syntax highlighting for Java, Groovy, XML and JavaScript. It follows in the footsteps of jEdit Syntax package and Apache Batik XML editor kit (contributed by Kiyut) and is available under the Apache license.
• There’s a new Swing book out there! Tim Lavers and Lindsay Peters have written a book “Swing Extreme Testing” published by Packt Publishing. From the book site – This book is a practical guide to automated software testing for extreme Java programming using Swing GUIs, with lots of ready-to-use real-life examples and source code for automated testing of the software components usually regarded as too hard to test automatically.
• David Qiao and Wolfgang Zitzelsberger have announced integration between JIDE components and Synthetica look-and-feel.
• Richard Kennard has announced release 0.5 of the Metawidget project that takes domain objects in your applications and creates the UI widgets for them. It has support for SwingX, GWT, Groovy and applets.
• Andy Maleh introduces the Glimmer project that aims to create a JRuby DSL for creating cross-platform UIs with SWT.
• Peter Karich kicks off the series of articles on Spring Rich Client Project. Unlike server-oriented Spring projects, this has not seemed to receive nowhere as many resources to be actively targeting the major paint-points of rich client development. Answering the “when will 1.0 be released” with “when it’s ready” is not a good sign, and one of the commenters says that the plans are to rebrand it to Spring Desktop without “being bound to the current codebase”. If you’re planning to break backwards compatibility and have good reasons to do so – just say it as it is.
• David Qiao writes about adding arrow key support to the ButtonPanel component. Alexander Potochkin had a similar functionality in the JXButtonPanel a couple of years ago.
• Rajesh has a list of ten free docking frameworks for Java UI applications. One addition to the list comes from Davide Raccagni that has announced the new P74 graphical library. It contains a docking manager as well as a few other tools.