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

• Jan Erik Paulsen is working on a new RIA tool named Amanda. Some nice screenshots that use the Titanium look-and-feel that is based on Substance.
• The release notes for Java 5 on Leopard include a few new client properties that can be used to provide functionality missing from the core Swing components. Examples include indeterminate progress circular indicator, smaller controls and search text fields.
• Jan Haderka writes about detecting Caps Lock state on the JXLoginPanel SwingX component. This thread on java.net forums has additional comments. The current solution does not sound too robust, and since the correct approach requires using native code (which is currently missing from the JDK), use with care.
• Eclipse 3.4M3 release notes mention the new API on the Shell component. It allows setting an alpha channel value on supported platforms (see screenshot). While the matching functionality is available in the JNA project for Swing, it’s really time for the core Swing team to provide it in JDK. It’s missing in Tiger, it’s missing in Mustang, and it most probably won’t be in Dolphin (due to major work by the client team on the “Update N” which leaves them with only a few months for Dolphin).
• Hrish writes about problems with file access in signed applets under IE 7 on Windows Vista. There are some links to MSDN articles, but i think that a more important link would be to Chet’s blog on this subject where he says that “There is an issue worth noting here than cannot be fixed: IE7 on Vista will not let us access the file system outside the IE7 sandbox for applets. This means that even “signed” applets have no permission to write to arbitrary locations on disk. This behavior differs from the old behavior of applets on Windows, but given the restrictions of IE7, there is really no way around the problem.” I’m not sure how this sits along with the user comments on bug 6504236 that say that “there is a well documented design to allow IE add-ins access the file system from the user’s normal (Medium) Integrity level, rather the IE’s Low Integrity level: implement an Internet Explorer Broker Process“.

This week has also seen a few announcements:

• Mikael Grev has announced release 3.0 of MigLayout project. The main emphasis of this release is on automatic support for resolution independence, which is a very important topic that doesn’t get the attention it deserves (neither in Java world nor elsewhere).
• David Qiao has announced release 2.2.1 of JIDE component suite. The new components are group list, dual list and aggregate table – all of these are not available in the open-source common layer.
• Instantiations has announced release 6.5.0 of the WindowBuilder family of products with a few enhancements to the Swing designer.
• Hans Muller has announced release 1.03 of Swing Application Framework, the reference implementation of JSR 296, while Shannon Hickey has announced release 1.2 and release 1.2.1 of Beans Binding, the reference implementation of JSR 295. There are some breaking changes in the Beans Binding 1.2 (see release notes). While on one hand it is expected from an evolving project which has not been finalized, it brings some interesting questions nonetheless. The first one (this is also relevant for Swing Application Framework) – what exactly do the version numbers signify? Was the release 1.0 just something to “tag” and release so that people will consider it as a production-ready implementation? Or perhaps these are the versions used in NetBeans 6.0 betas – which makes it even worse considering that NetBeans is an IDE and these two projects are JSR reference implementations. And what happens when NetBeans 6.0 is frozen (somewhere this week) and there are still breaking API changes in these two projects?

The release candidate for version 4.1 of Substance look-and-feel (code-named Lima) is available. The list of new features includes:

• Full HiDPI support (part 1, part 2, part 3).
• Font policy for Gnome desktops.
• API for installing a scaled font policy.
• New Creme Coffee skin.
• Inner border painters.
• New visuals for tabbed pane content border.
• Transition-aware animating icons for control icons.
• New version of Xoetrope color wheel for the color chooser component.
• Better visuals for the JRibbon component (part 1, part 2, part 3) in the Substance Flamingo plugin.
• Support for the GroupLayout baseline functionality in the Substance Baseline plugin.

Some applications may need to follow the instructions in the migration guide. Target date for release is November 12. Only defects will be fixed until this date.

In addition to the core release candidate, the following Substance plugins and modules have been updated as well:

• Substance Flamingo plugin for the latest 2.1dev drop of Flamingo component suite.
• Substance SwingX plugin for the build 255 of SwingX component suite.
• Substance Baseline plugin for release 1.0.2 of Swing-Layout project.
• Substance NetBeans module for 6.0beta2 of NetBeans IDE.

Special thanks for bug reporting and testing go to Mikael Grev, Vincent Trussart, Kamil Paral, Klaus Rheinwald and Jean-Francois Poilpret.

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

• Geoffrey Wiseman shares an interesting tip on hiding a UI during the test running. In order to get the UI tests running on the continuous integration server, they needed to find a way to run in headless environment. While it appears that the solution works only on X server, it opens an intriguing array of possibilities which hopefully can be implemented in a cross-platform way in a general purpose UI test library such as Fest (by Alex Ruiz and Yvonne Wang Price). This would be useful in areas beyond testing. For example, most of the documentation screenshots for Substance (that show various themes, watermarks and skins applied to the same UI) are taken by a Robot-controled process. During this process (which takes a few minutes) i have to make sure that i don’t accidentally interact with the frames and dialogs that get captured so as not to interfere with the correct visuals. Can this process can be done in a headless mode with an approach similar to what Geoffrey is describing?
• Davide Raccagni announced release 2.0 of his A03 look-and-feel (link a little slow to open because of embedded videos). A major change is that A03 now can run under JDK 5.0 (unlike the previous releases). In addition, it features a theming layer and has a few interesting visuals (such as decorated title pane gradients, progress bar fill pattern, rotated tabs on left and right placement and some others). Personally, i’m very happy to see that some code in A03 is based on the code from Substance (which is, in turn, based on some code from Looks, Quaqua and Xoetrope).
• Elliott Hughes shares his frustration with the JTextPane implementation when it shows an HTML document. Starting from trying to prevent beeps on setText() API, he quickly gets into one of the biggest gaps in Swing as a modern UI toolkit (not mentioned in my previous rant) – support for HTML 4.0. Hasn’t it been eight years since it was finalized?

While the Java blogosphere is raging with debates on closures, properties and other negligible language-level features, the client-side battle is still fought between Microsoft, Adobe and Apple. And while finally Sun decided to step in with JavaFX and improved applet handling, this will change little without the tools for content handling.

As i already said, the customers don’t care about the technology. In “The Agnostic Geek“, Brandon Carson writes:

when you look at a web page, do you think, “Gee, I wonder if they coded this in BBEdit or Dreamweaver?” I don’t know about you, but I don’t give a flip what software product is used to create a web page. Use TextEdit for all I care.

And so, who cares that the applets will load instantly when there are so few good applets? Just look at the amazing breadth of Flash content created by professional designers. Content that has rich multimedia capabilities. Capabilities that come built in with the platform. Platform that is oriented towards content.

So, what are my top two wishes for Java desktop for 2008?

Number one: Cross-platform support for H.264 and FLV formats.

Showing is good, but it also must support creating the content and editing the content (just look at the Sliverlight demoes). And don’t tell me that 99.9% of the market doesn’t need editing. If you want to lead the market, you have to cover everything that the competition has and then some.

I don’t know about the licensing issues, but the reference implementation for H.264 is not that big. And Onavia already has pure-Java player. So it can’t be that hard once you decide to put as many resources on that as you do on JavaFX. And even better, accelerate it with OpenGL and Direct3D, while at the same time gracefully degrading to software loops on older cards.

Number two: Converters and viewers for competing markup formats.

You know what i’m talking about – those pesky competitors that have 99.9% percent of the consumer-facing rich desktop market. Flash / SWF, Flex / MXML and WPF / XAML. Each has its own set of designer tools for creating rich content. Each has armies of professional designers versatile in using those tools, in addition to Photoshop, Maya and others. Do you really expect them to master yet another (unproven) designer tool?

If JavaFX wants to have a fighting chance, it needs to provide a simple migration path. A path that allows taking an existing Flex / Silverlight application and importing it to JavaFX (at least the visuals). XAML has at least three – converter from Maya, converter from Photoshop and converter from SWF. The importing is not enough. You have to have exporting as well. If you’re not convinced, read what Joel Spolsky says about how Excel managed to overpower Lotus:

And this reminded me of Excel’s tipping point, which happened around the time of Excel 4.0. And the biggest reason was that Excel 4.0 was the first version of Excel that could write Lotus spreadsheets transparently.

Yep, you heard me. Write. Not read. It turns out that what was stopping people from switching to Excel was that everybody else they worked with was still using Lotus 123. They didn’t want a product that would create spreadsheets that nobody else could read: a classic Chicken and Egg problem. When you’re the lone Excel fan in a company where everyone else is using 123, even if you love Excel, you can’t switch until you can participate in the 123 ecology.

If you want to have professional designers to switch to JavaFX, provide a clear path back. Not that they’ll take it (of course, if the tools and the runtime are bad, they will), but it will give them a nice sense of security.

An extra step would be to allow using the same exact content at runtime without converting it to JavaFX. Soyatec does it partially for XAML, so it can be done. But if you do it, support the complete feature set (including 3D and, guess what, rich multimedia). A bonus part would be to include a bitmap to SVG converter – see VectorMagic for inspiration.

That’s it. I have only two wishes. Granted, these are two big hefty wishes. Will they come true? The first one might partially be, and the second one is highly unlikely.