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

• Jeremy Wood has been a busy blogger this week. First, he compares different approaches in using spinners for specifying length measurements in different units. Next, he presents a dialog to layout several tiles / cells on a print page. And finally, he closes the week with a partial implementation of Mac “Windows” menu that tracks the list of currently open top-level windows and their respective states.
• Olivier Gout has a prototype of WYSIWYG theme designer for Nimbus. The “official” Nimbus designer promised at this year’s JavaOne is nowhere in sight, and only time will tell whether this new attempt will outlive the growing list of Synth designers / builders mentioned in Swing Links of the Week edition of March 23, 2008.
• Patrick Ahlbrecht has a skeleton implementation of persisting window geometry and toolbar location between successive launches of an application window.
• Kai Toedter has written a demo application that shows how to use OSGi Declarative Services (DS) and Spring Dynamic Modules (Spring DM) together with Swing UI (and the Swing Application Framework, JSR 296). The Person Manager project is licensed under EPL.
• William Chen has announced his work on the Visual Swing Designer for Eclipse.
• Adam Bien continues to favor Swing over SWT in his two-part attack. Starting with how to make your Swing coding more efficient, he then continues to address the perceived Swing weak spots. From reading these and previous postings, looks like Adam holds a particular dislike towards SWT tables, and i couldn’t disagree more. Just like it takes quite some time to fully understand your way around Swing tables (including models, renderers, editors, listeners and much more), it takes a little bit more than a few suggested hours to switch to the SWT / JFace approach. This is not to say that one is clearly better than the other. It’s just that if you come with prejudice or a very strong knowledge in one, the other will seem clunky, over engineered and convoluted.
• Two interesting Swing-related threads on the Google group for Javaposse. The first addresses the misunderstanding of the painters issue and the community handling throughout the entire process, and the second calls for community questions on JavaFX.
• Andres Almiray has announced release 2.0.1 of JIDE Builder and 0.1 beta release of GfxPad.
• Roman Kennke continues his work with Java2D, writing about first Java2D pipeline implementation on top of the DirectFB hardware abstraction layer.
• Ken Orr has announced release 0.9.3 of Mac Widgets for Java. Major new addition in this release – iApp style scroll bars. Is it me, or is the reflection of the new scroll bars incorrectly flipped?
• Clemens Eisserer reports that his XRender pipeline has been integrated into the IcedTea fully open sourced port of OpenJDK.

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?