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

• Gregg Bolinger extends the application-wide hotkeys with a lookup dialog, complete with wiring the events for navigating and canceling.
• Roman Kennke summarizes the Caciocavallo project that aimed to create portable GUI backends for OpenJDK graphics stack.
• Santhosh Kumar has an interesting solution for cross-LAF combobox with group separators. The solution involves putting the grouping logic inside the renderer, and one of the commenters wonders whether this logic should be part of the model or of the specific view.
• Piet Blok writes about the JXLayer project and his experiments with multiple layers and sharing UI instances.
• Alexander Potochkin has assumed the role of specification lead for reference implementation of JSR 295 (Swing Application Framework). He shares his thoughts, outlining the proposed changes and soliciting feedback on his blog, and has already submitted a few changes to the project source repository.
• Native font rasterization is one of the major features added to JDK 6u10 on Windows platforms, and has impressed Naiden Gochev that has screenshots of old rasterizer, SWT (native) rasterizer and NetBeans running under the new rasterizer. Too bad that the Windows look-and-feel only uses Segoe UI on the menus…
• Jasper Potts sums up the work he and Richard Bair have been doing on Nimbus look-and-feel. Perhaps the more disappointing part is that the highly-anticipated designer tool announced last September still can’t be made available to the public. The followup post has an example of skinning a slider under Nimbus. If you plan on customizing Nimbus with painters, note that the com.sun.java.swing.Painter interface is only available in JDK 6u10, so you might as well instantiate Nimbus with the fully qualified class name instead of iterating over available LAFs and querying their names.
• On the Synth-related note, Xavier Young has started a series of tutorials on configuring the EaSynth look-and-feel. The first part is on general button customization, and the second part is on arrow buttons, check boxes, radio buttons and toggle buttons.
• Yves Zoundi has announced release 0.0.3 of VFSJFileChooser component that extends the JFileChooser to browse remote file repositories such as FTP, SFTP, WEBDAV and more.
• Andres Almiray writes about Groovy new binding features, their applicability to SwingBuilder and the comparison with JavaFX binding.
• Christophe Le Besnerais continues his explorations on modern interfaces, aiming to recreate the look similar to that of OnWired web site in Swing.
• Michael Bar-Sinai proposes solutions for complex table cell rendering logic in his java.net article. In particular, he has a class-based and rule-based approaches for separating same-column rendering logic into more manageable code.
• Finally, Maxim Zakharenkov has released version 1.3 of SwingExplorer project. New in this release – NetBeans plugin and tracing component addition.

This space will be quiet for the next two weeks, including the Swing links of the week series. See you on the other side of the vacation.

The goal of Flamingo project is to provide a small and cohesive set of powerful UI components with functionality similar to or superseding that of Vista Explorer and Office 2007. Command bar is one of the more complicated UI components in the Office 2007, and Flamingo’s JRibbon is the all-Java implementation of this component. It is already being used by a number of projects which provide valuable feedback on the missing parts and help in prioritizing their development. Recently, i have added two user-requested features to the JRibbon – modifying the contents of in-ribbon galleries and support for contextual tabs.

The documentation of JRibbon has been updated to bring it in-sync with the latest 3.1dev branch. If you’re new to this component, start with the overview and then delve into the specifics of each one of the ribbon’s building blocks.

• Ribbon overview.
• Ribbon bands.
• Ribbon tasks.
• Contextual task groups.
• Ribbon creation.
• Ribbon resizing.

To read more on modifying the contents of in-ribbon galleries scroll down to the “Dynamically changing gallery content” section in the ribbon bands page. To read about contextual task group, first read the page on creating a task group and then read the “Working with contextual task groups” section of the ribbon creation page.

Here is a screenshot of a ribbon with selected contextual tab. Note the vertical lines that separate the tasks in the two contextual groups. Also note the different background colorization of the task toggle tab and the top portion of the ribbon – this is done to provide visual indication that the currently selected task is a contextual one.

This marks the last new features for the version 3.1 of Flamingo. You’re more than welcome to download the latest 3.1dev drop and try it in your applications. The release candidate for Flamingo 3.1 is scheduled on September 1 with the final release scheduled on September 15. Click on the button below to launch a demo of JRibbon component in action (requires Java 6).

Project LightBeam was created a few months ago to assist Swing look-and-feel developers to reliably measure performance aspects of their libraries. LightBeam has a collection of static and dynamic scenarios that test different aspects of painting and tracking changes on core Swing components making it easier to identify performance bottlenecks and helping prevent performance regressions after introducing new features. LightBeam has been extensively used throughout the development cycle of version 5.0 of Substance look-and-feel to bring it in line with other core and active third-party look-and-feels.

An unexpected and welcome usage of LightBeam comes from the XRender Pipeline project that aims to create a new Java2D rendering pipeline based upong the X11 XRender extension. This project is part of OpenJDK Community Innovators’ Challenge that has reached the submission deadline yesterday, and is lead by Clemens Eisserer. The benchmark page of XRender project uses two third-party open-source benchmarking suites – MigLayout swing benchmark and LightBeam. Here is one of the benchmark charts comparing the performance of X11 and XRender pipelines under LightBeam (unfortunately misspelled):