Swing links of the week: December 14, 2008

December 15th, 2008

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

  • Chris Adamson provides his own take on my interview with Richard Bair, particularly highlighting Richard’s statement that JavaFX is effectively Swing 2.0. This has also been picked up by Josh Fruhlinger at Javaworld.
  • Devoxx has brought some news about the future of SwingX and Swing in JDK 7. As reported by Jan Haderka, Alexander Potochkin will be replacing Richard as the official SwingLabs project lead. In addition, some of the SwingLabs sub-projects will be part of JDK 7. This includes App Framework, JXLayer, Painters API and DatePicker. A gigantic missing piece is the BeansBinding, and this is already being queried by the community – update: see what Richard had to say about this. Another interesting piece is concerning the inclusion of painters, and how they will play with Nimbus’ own painters, as well as the level of possible customization of core Swing components.
  • Christopher Deckers has announced release 0.9.7 of DJ Sweet project that aims to bring sophisticated components for SWT. The main focus in this release is the improvement of the Web Browser control, and the addition of a Flash Player with a simple API.
  • Alexey Ushakov is the technical lead for JWebPane component, and he has finally revealed tentative availability schedule for this project. Contrary to my prediction, it looks that this component will be lightweight, providing Java2D-based implementation of WebKit painting hooks. Alexey’s comment on licensing issue is questionable at best, and has been discussed briefly by Remy Rakic.
  • Alex Ruiz is writing about an interesting usage of FEST Swing library – to analyze the UI hierarchy of JavaFX applications.
  • A few months ago there was significant blogosphere activity around using Swing as a foundation to build UIs in JVM-powered languages, such as JRuby, Scala, Jython and Groovy. Unfortunately only one camp has remained steadily active throughout the time – congratulations to Groovyheads for persisting in analyzing the deficiencies of pure Swing development and pushing the envelope. Danno Ferrin has announced release 0.1 beta of Griffon, and Andres Almiray writes about plugin support in Griffon. Andres is also busy experimenting with the builder support for both core Swing and third-party Swing components, and this weeks he has announced two new sub-projects, SwingPad and FlamingoBuilder.
  • After last week’s entry on skinning the JScrollBar component, Ken Orr laments the lack of visual tools for assisting the creation of Swing look-and-feels and hopes to see the Nimbus designer released soon. In the comments, Remy Rakic speculates that it will be soon morphed into JavaFX designer.
  • Jeremy Wood delves into Java2D, presenting an extensible implementation of charcoal stroke.

And now for the spotlight of the week. Java IDEs such as NetBeans and IDEA has frequently been quoted as examples of large Swing based applications. In the consumer-facing market, perhaps the most widely used application is LimeWire. This week the developers of LimeWire have announced the first alpha drop of the next release. The first two blog entries are out, and hopefully will be followed by more details on the technical implementation and integration of such libraries as SwingX components and painters, Glazed Lists, MigLayout and XULRunner. Click on the thumbnail to see a larger screenshot of LimeWire 5.0alpha.