Here are some Swing links that you might have missed during this week:
- Richard Kennard has announced release 0.43 of his Metawidget project. Geertjan Wielenga picks this up on the DZone, and Dieter Krachtus has engaged in an architectural discussion on the project. Richard also shows how Metawidget can emit JIDE components.
- Jan Erik Paulsen vents his frustration with some of the Swing pain points, including layout managers, audio / video support and JavaFX design tools vision. Over the past year Jan Erik had a number of very interesting projects, including Capture, Photoshop Express and Amanda, and it looks like the topics above have hindered the progress of these projects to some degree.
- Eugene Toporov announces release 1.0 of commercial JxBrowser library for embedding Mozilla Firefox browser into AWT / Swing applications.
- Ingo Maier announces release 0.1 of scala.swing, an event based library for building Swing applications in Scala.
- Jacek Furmankiewicz continues his explorations of Java builders for Swing layouts, and it looks like this approach strikes a chord with his readers (see followup by Andres Almiray).
- Continuing the trend of Swing as a “UI virtual machine” for JVM-based dynamic languages, Greg Trasuk experiments with project JyMatisse that allows using Jython as the backend for Matisse-generated forms.
- And finally, Christophe Le Besnerais has published a Swing component for cropping images. The ability to install a custom filter (illustrated by grayscaling and blurring the outside of the cropped area) is especially impressive, and my only concern is using JLayeredPane as a base class. Perhaps using JPanel with OverlayLayout can be a simpler solution?
If i had to put a number on it, i would say that more than 90% of the feedback that i receive on my projects is on bad behavior (exceptions, visual artifacts, broken APIs etc). I don’t complain. Not only this person decided to download and evaluate one of my projects. He also decided to spend his time to report the problem he is seeing via the project forums, mailing lists or a private e-mail. I’ve said it before and i’ll say it again – a feature that has absolutely no feedback is a feature that nobody is using.
In fact, as a developer myself i don’t even expect the “thank you” e-mails (and this post is most certainly not a solicitation for one). However, i would like to use this space as a collective “thank you” to all the open-source libraries that i am using and the people behind them. Please know that when you don’t hear from me, it only means that your library is working as expected. Thanks for all your free time and countless hours spent working on your projects. Thanks for spending this time away from your other hobbies, and sometimes even away from your family. It is much appreciated by your users. It is much appreciated by the community in general, even when we decide to go with a competing solution. Having choice is good for us as users, but it is also good for you as developers.
I would also like to thank the developers of the core engine itself. The work that you do on the JDK is seen by millions of people and even when we complain, it is all in good spirit. Do not be discouraged when you make a great new feature and all people seem to focus on is one specific bug that is still unfixed in the core. It is in our nature to exaggerate and focus on the negative, but this does not mean that we do not appreciate the work that you are doing.
And finally, i would like to thank developers working on new projects and exploring new frontiers. Keep up the work and don’t get discouraged by the level of attention from the outside community. Good ideas take some time to settle in and win developers’ hearts.
Here are some Swing links that you might have missed during this week:
- Sandip Chitale has two tips on using JOptionPane component. The first tip show how to use multiline text and images, and the second tip is on making the component dialog resizable.
- David Qiao has announced the official release 2.0 of JIDE Desktop Application Framework.
- Maxim Zakharenkov has announced release 1.0 of the Swing Explorer project. The getting started guide shows the potential of this project for visual debugging of Swing application. The player feature looks particularly impressive.
- Nazmul Idris sums up the limitations of the current native font rasterizer in 6u10 latest builds.
- Geertjan Wielenga writes an overview article on FEST-Swing project by Alex Ruiz and Yvonne Price.
- Roman Kennke posts updates on the Caciocavallo project. The first is on build errors, and the second is on font rasterization.
- Fabien sums up a few libraries and tools that help building Swing applications.
- And finally, the Glimmer project proposal has been accepted by Eclipse. The goal of this project is to wrap SWT with a JRuby DSL for easier authoring of cross-platform user interfaces. While interesting on itself, this might also prove a good catalyst and inject some life into the Swing-based efforts in Groovy, JRuby and Scala.
It gives me great pleasure to announce the official release for version 4.3 of Substance look-and-feel (code-named Nairobi). The list of new features includes:
It was on this day in 2005 that Substance project has been created. It is now three years old and to celebrate this occasion i have redesigned the main project page to be less cluttered and a little better organized. Hope that you like it, and if you have any comments, i will be more than interested to hear your opinion.
A few screenshots of the new functionality in Substance 4.3:
New decoration painters applied to the Flamingo ribbon component:
Highlight painters on table (note a single-line border separators):
Colorized visuals of disabled selected buttons:
A button with 72 pixel font:
Click on the button below to launch a signed WebStart application that shows the available Substance features.
The sources and binaries are available on
the project site and the CVS repository.
