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

• Christopher Deckers writes about the new functionality in drop 0.9.3 of his DJ Native Swing project. The main focus is on the possibility to mix heavyweight and lightweight components with lightweight components on top, to change their Z-order or re-parent them.
• The new Metawidget project led by Richard Kennard announced its first drop. The stated goal of the project is to create UI components by inspecting existing back-end architectures (beans, annotations, XML config files). The target UI frameworks include Swing, JSF, Struts and Android, and it is possible to add support for more.
• froglogic announced release 3.3 of their Squish UI testing tool. Main new features relevant to Swing development include support for testing mixed Swing / SWT applications, applets and WebStart applications.
• Jan Haderka writes about the planned schedule for drop 0.9.2 of SwingX. The current timeline is late February or early March. Are we talking about the first stable release for JavaOne? :)
• Philipp Meier shares a tip on writing cross-LAF cell renderers, based on an example of a combobox under the Nimbus look-and-feel.
• Vaclav Pech is a new voice in the Groovy community that uses Swing as the “native” UI toolkit. His entries on binding and multithreading show a few examples of conciseness and expressive power of SwingBuilder. Now, if only my action listeners were all that simple…
• Andres Almiray continues his tutorials on GraphicsBuilder. The second part talks about shapes and outlines.

The ribbon component is one of the major parts of the Flamingo component suite. It is a Swing component that provides capabilities of Office 2007 Command Bar, and the detailed documentation has been updated to show the latest visuals, APIs and terminology of the ribbon component. Here, i will show a few screenshots that illustrate the ribbon functionality.

The following screenshot shows a sample ribbon component (under Metal look-and-feel with the default Ocean theme):

Ribbon consists of a set of ribbon tasks. Only one task is visible at a time (a-la card layout). Logically, a task also includes its toggle button (the top portion of the ribbon control):

When another task is selected (programmatically or via user interaction), the contents of the selected task replace the previously selected task:

A ribbon task consists of a number of ribbon task bands:

A ribbon task band can contain command buttons in different states, usual core Swing controls (buttons, check boxes, combo boxes) and in-ribbon galleries. The available width is distributed between the task bands based on the priority of the elements in the task. As can be seen in these screenshots, some command buttons are in <font color="darkblue">ElementState.BIG</font> (big icon and text), some are in <font color="darkblue">ElementState.MEDIUM</font> (small icon and text), and the others are in <font color="darkblue">ElementState.SMALL</font> (only small icon).

An in-ribbon gallery allows scrolling and operating a large number of command buttons in a limited space.

Clicking on the gallery expand button opens a popup panel that shows the gallery command buttons arranged in a multi-row scrollable grid:

As mentioned earlier on this blog, the ribbon component uses the visuals of the current look-and-feel. Here is how ribbon looks under the Windows XP with Windows look-and-feel:

And under Windows Vista:

And under Ubuntu 7.10 with GTK look-and-feel:

And under Looks Plastic XP:

And under Synthetica Mauve Metallic:

And finally under Pagosoft:

The release candidate of Flamingo 3.0 is scheduled for February 11, with the official release scheduled for February 18. The latest binaries and source can be downloaded here.

It gives me great pleasure to announce the official release for version 4.2 of Substance look-and-feel (code-named Memphis). The list of new features includes:

• Support for native text rendering in the Bramble plugin.
• Support for component colorization with the new SubstanceLookAndFeel.COLORIZATION_FACTOR client property.
• Font policy for KDE desktops.
• More streamlined visuals of arrow buttons for combo boxes and spinners.
• New visuals for Office Blue 2007, Raven Graphite and Raven Graphite Glass skins that provide better blending for disabled controls and more consistent painting of check marks.
• Cleaner and more streamlined appearance of tables (including tables wrapped in scroll panes)
• Auto-dispose of tab overview dialog.

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

• Substance SwingX plugin for the build 795 of SwingX component suite.
• Substance Baseline plugin for release 1.0.2 of Swing-Layout project.
• Substance NetBeans module for release 6.0 of NetBeans IDE.
• Substance button shaper pack.
• Substance theme pack.
• Substance watermark pack.

A few screenshots of the new functionality in Substance 4.2:

Support for native text rasterization (viewed here with Segoe UI 12 pixel font under Windows Vista on JDK 5.0):

Component colorization with 50% factor (both background and foreground):

Respecting the KDE desktop font settings:

Better visuals for disabled controls under Raven Graphite skin:

Removing visual noise on tables and table headers in scroll panes:

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

• Chris Campbell introduces Effects Framework, the third major component of Scene Graph project. Some of the effects seem to be based on Romain’s original work on new blending modes, and some look to bring Photoshop-based functionality to Java and JavaFX applications.
• Speaking of the JavaFX focus in the upcoming 6.0 update N, there are two very interesting bug reports in the bug parade. 6656651 talks about native font rasterizing (at least on Windows platform) and 6655001 hints on support for translucent and arbitrarily shaped top-level windows, backed up by hardware acceleration on Windows Vista.
• The Groovy community continues charging ahead with wrapping complex Java2D code in simpler builders. Andres Almiray announces release 0.4.5 of GraphicsBuilder with support for more than 60 filters. Two examples that show the power of JHLabs filters and the simplicity in which they are exposed in GraphicsBuilder can be found here and here. Andres also kicks off the first part of his tutorial on DZone, and Dave Cherry rounds up with the support for JFreeChart library.
• Nazmul Idris continues his tutorials on SwingX components. This week he features the tutorials on task pane containers and busy labels.
• Jesse Kuhnert writes a rather misguided rant about Swing. The three points that he mentions as Swing’s worst parts are quite easily addressed. The core layout managers are indeed terrible – but what about the great third-party layout managers? A possible analogy for the web development would be doing everything in pure HTML (and its deficiencies with using tables for everything) instead of using much more flexible CSS layouts. The next point is about rendering hints and has been addressed in Chet’s blog. One can also employ more advanced techniques such as bytecode injection. And since when web developers had access to rendering hints? The last point is about signals and slots. Not sure how this relates to Swing. Perhaps something like Event Bus project?
• Fabrizio Giudici continues one of the points touched on in the previous item. His post shows how he is using bytecode injection to add property change support to Java beans.