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

• Bruce Eckel wonders if anyone really cares about desktop Java, and the responses are mixed. Any established technology has its shortcomings, and it would be short-sighted to assume that the same question will not be asked in five-ten years about Flex. In the meantime, those have have invested in learning Swing produce good-looking and responsive applications.
• Karl Tauber has announced release 4.0 of the JFormDesigner tool for designing Swing user interfaces. New in this version are support for GroupLayout, FormLayout 1.2, improved conversion of IntelliJ forms and more.
• JavaPosse has talked about multi-threading in UI toolkits, and there’s a follow-up discussion on this subject in the Google group of the show.
• Eskil Blomfeldt reports that Qt Jambi AWT bridge has been rewritten to provide better support for window activation and whitespace around embedded components. It sounds that this project faces much the same issues as Albireo (that aims to provide the bridge between Swing and SWT). The Qt Jambi AWT bridge has still some unresolved issues with keyboard focus – something that has been addressed in Albireo.
• Alex Ruiz has announced the first beta for release 1.0 of FEST Swing, a library that provides a fluent interface for functional Swing UI testing.
• JavaSwing.net has a number of useful tutorials on using the JTextField and related classes, including the introduction to DocumentFilter to enforce upper limit on the number of characters, auto-conversion to upper case, number-only content and e-mail content. For more background on using regular expressions in e-mail verification see this article.
• Clemens Eisserer has committed the first changeset for the XRender pipeline under the OpenJDK innovators’ challenge program.
• And finally, Alexander Potochkin writes about the internal implementation of JXLayer‘s event interception on subcomponents in a non-intrusive manner using the InputContext class.