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

• Christophe Le Besnerais has a custom implementation of Paint interface to paint a glossy button with arc-shaped gradient. Paint is one of the more advanced concepts in Java2D and it’s tricky to create a performant implementation. The only visual thing that is missing for here in the whole “web 2.0” concept is the soft-clipping along the arc itself (especially visible if you change the value of the third slider that controls the color of the top part. Chris Campbell has written about this problem before, and his solution involves an intermediate image.
• Roman Kennke posts an update on progress of Caciocavallo project that aims to create an AWT implementation for X Window System without using any of Sun’s internal classes.
• Jacek Furmankiewicz continues working on the SwingBuilder project, adding more support for bindings, long running tasks and integration with Commons Validation.
• Hans Muller‘s swan song has been sent to the users mailing list of AppFramework (reference implementation of JSR 296). I have already mentioned that this project has been effectively dead for the last six months, and Hans has quite a long list of to-do things in his posting. This project has been heavily promoted throughout the entire desktop track at JavaOne this week, and even though Amy Fowler assures that it will continue to be developed, it would be wise to wait and see if the words are backed by @Actions :)
• Geertjan Wielenga writes about using Maxim Zakharenkov‘s SwingExplorer inside a NetBeans module.

And some stray thoughts on JavaOne:

• Underpromise and overdeliver. Good example – the playback video support for JavaFX and Java. Bad example – javafx.com.
• I wonder why the video support hasn’t been featured more prominently during the keynote (instead of the frozen single-threaded demos). This is a very significant step forward for client Java, much more so than glitzier eye-candy dragging applets to the desktop. On the other hand, when the hype is that applets are back, who am i to judge?
• I was almost hoping that the video support would address the number one wish i had for desktop Java in 2008 – cross-platform support for H.264 and FLV. We’re still not there yet – the cross-platform codecs are rather unknown in the general desktop area (one from On2, and another from the Open Media Commons project that has yet to deliver any binaries), and H.264 and FLV will only be supported when native codes are installed.
• And no, those were not 200 different video streams mapped on the rotating cube. Those were 200 different views on a handful of different video streams. Still impressive.
• The best presentation that i have attended did not use a single slide from Sun’s template. Those of you who are familiar with work of Garr Reynolds and Nancy Duarte should already know the answer to “why?”, and Ben Galbraith’s reputation has apparently allowed him to swerve past Sun’s lawyers and copywriters to present a very strong, clean and focused talk on user and interaction design.
• And while we’re at it – do we really have to ruin every single session title and slide that use the word Java? I think we can figure out if Java is Java™ technology, Java™ platform or Java™ programming language by ourselves . At least they didn’t turn “Effective Java” into “Effective Java™ Programming Language”…
• Literally bending and picking ugly things off the stage, having dozens of people come and go, showing IDE screens with 50+ lines of code, demoes freezing on the most important day of the year. Makes one wonder why Steve Jobs’ presentations get so much hyped before, during and after…

We’ve just finished presenting our Birds-of-Feather session on high resolution monitors. Thanks to everybody for coming at such a late hour, and thanks to Mike for presenting this session with me. To all of you who attended but want to see the slides once again, and to those of you who couldn’t attend, here are the slides:

• PowerPoint 2007 format – the original slides as presented, with all the animations.
• PDF format – the same content but without the animations.

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

• Mikael Grev has announced release 3.5 of his MigLayout layout manager for Swing and SWT applications. He also has a technical session on MigLayout this week at JavaOne (TS-4928).
• Maxim Zakharenkov will present his Swing Explorer tool with Alexander Potochkin at JavaOne as well (BO-5063).
• Dirk Lemmermann writes about release 1.1 of FlexGantt charting framework that is build on top of Swing.
• Angelo De Caro has announced release 1.4.2 of MyDoggy docking framework for Swing applications.
• And finally, Jack Furmankiewicz continues experimenting with JavaBuilder library, writing about two-way binding support and separating binding definitions from the UI element definitions.

I have the honor to be joined by Mike Swingler (Swing / AWT lead for Apple VM) and to present an evening session on high resolution monitors at this year’s JavaOne. This has been in making since even before last year’s conference, and i am grateful to Jeff Dinkins that put me in touch with Mike.

Here is a short overview of what we’re going to talk about:

• Introduction – general overview of the field, including terms (pixels, points and in between), a few examples of high-resolution monitors and the reasons why this matters.
• Broken applications – visual artifacts in mainstream applications running in high resolution mode on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Ubuntu Gnome and Mac OS X.
• Scaling modes – three main modes that different UI toolkits (such as WPF and Cocoa) provide for scaling the UIs. Each one has its advantages and requirements from the UI developers.
• Testing your app – how to test your application under high resolution mode on the usual displays.
• Swing tips – things to do if you’re developing a Swing application.

Mike brings in his expertise from the framework perspective (and very interesting things available in Leopard for both Cocoa and Swing), and i will be talking about the low-level details of scaling application visuals, touching on such subjects as icons, control visuals, layout metrics and more. If you’re interested in this topic, please join us next Tuesday at 9:30 PM. The session number is BOF-5037 and it will be held in Hall E 135. See you then.