Swing links of the week: November 30, 2008

December 1st, 2008

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

In three days, JavaFX Desktop 1.0 will be officially released. I have been skeptical about JavaFX over the last few months, and while this may be attributed to general inclination of programmers towards being “entrenched” in the technologies that they know, there are other reasons as well. Aside from a few unnamed technology partners that were participating in shaping the capabilities of this release, the community has been effectively shut from lending its hand in commenting, testing and evolving the platform. We have long heard about “being blown away” by the new functionality being brought by JavaFX to the RIA market, and this week we will finally see if it is going to live up to the marketing hype.

Personally, i will be very glad to see at least one out of the following ten items being available for JavaFX, as well as cross-platform Swing applications come December 4:

  1. 6u10 / 6u11 for Apple – [update] see bug 6761033 for some interesting news.
  2. Full java lightweight rendering of SWF files even without installed Flash engine
  3. Full java lightweight rendering of H.264 files even without installed codecs
  4. Adaptive video streaming based on the client CPU and network utilization
  5. Video capture and creation
  6. Fully skinnable lightweight browser component based on WebKit or Mozilla / Gecko
  7. Inclusion of form-oriented layout manager
  8. Support for high level shader language (HLSL) for hardware accelerated custom effects
  9. Nimbus designer
  10. JavaFX.com with JavaFX-only applet driven content

And is it me, or are we going to see Sun ditching its own module initiative and move towards restructuring JDK as a collection of OSGI bundles?