Not much time has passed since i’ve announced that the Swing link of the week trail on this blog has come to an end, and Jonathan Giles has decided to step in and continue posting theweekly round-up of the Swing related news.

You can find the first entry of the year on Jonathan’s blog, and he just started twittering about it. So, you’re more than welcome to subscribe to his feed and send your links his way (he has his e-mail on the first entry).

To aid Jonathan in his weekly quest, here are a few places that i used to collect the links:

• dzone new links
• java.net blogs
• javablogs.com custom query (keyword Swing)
• java.net desktop forums
• java.sun.com desktop forums
• javaposse google newsgroup
• feeds of blogs previously features on the series

This has not been an easy decision to make, but unfortunately the reality sometimes interferes with our best intentions. I regrettably can no longer find time to continue maintaining Flamingo documentation and Swing Links of the Week trail on this blog.

About half a year ago our family has grown, and i have created an Amazon wishlist to allow the users of my projects to express their thanks and support the ongoing efforts being put into them. While i am thankful for the few gifts that i have received via this program (and one weird conversation about relative merits of one of the items on the list), this has not proven to be as sustainable as i hoped it to be.

Something has to go, and while documentation is still high on my list of priorities, i need to be realistic. The quasi-guiltware approach did not work, and Flamingo does not have (yet) enough users to justify the initial upfront investment in writing paid documentation (a-la JFreeChart). So, if you want to use Flamingo components (ribbon and friends), you will have to dig into the code.

The same goes for Swing Links of the Week. After more than a year of running this weekly trail, it is time to stop. You can find most of the links at DZone, JavaBlogs and java.net forums. You’ll just have to spend a little bit more time doing so :)

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

• The discontent about timely and transparent disclosure of long-term plans for Swing is growing, and this week Geertjan Wielenga vents his frustration about the uncertain future of Swing in light of the Sun’s push for JavaFX as the apparent future of Java on desktop.
• Andres Almiray has been hard at work with the Groovy builders for various third-party Swing components. He released version 2.1 of jideBuilder, has started work on the MacWidgetsBuilder, and showcases a few screenshots of the SwingPad 0.2.
• Alex Ruiz kicks off a new series about testing JavaFX UIs by extending his FEST Swing library.
• Jean Francois Poilpret is wondering whether it’s time to fork the SwingLayout project and start fixing its bugs. I can only speak for my own open-source projects (Substance and Flamingo), but i have found a surprisingly insignificant resistance to Java 6 as the minimum runtime requirement. This may be due to a relatively low usage of these two libraries, or this may be due to greater flexibility of runtime environments on the client side Java.
• And finally, Yves Zoundi has announced two new releases of his projects. XPontus XML editor has reached release 1.0.0.2, and VFSJFileChooser remote file chooser component has reached release 0.0.4.

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

• Heidi Rakels has announced release 1.4.0 of Sanaware Java Docking library. Notable new in this version are support for applets and bug fixes for GTK and Nimbus look-and-feels.
• Jennie Hall has an example on using progress monitoring APIs with SwingWorkers. Read comments by Richard Osbaldeston on EDT-related violations.
• Geertjan Wielenga picks on the news of improved heavyweight / lightweight support in 6u12 b02. In the comments Gili Tzabari points bugs 6776743 and 6783411 that are still open in the area. Also, as confirmed on this forum thread, this support introduces a performance regression of around 1.5% even for applications that do not use heavyweight components.
• Jeanette Winzenburg has some strong words regarding the “JavaFX == Swing 2” in the comments on Chris Adamson‘s editorial blog on java.net, with intense followup discussion on omitting BeansBinding from Java 7 continuing in this java.net forum thread. If you are interested in this subject, an “embedded” discussion between Osvaldo Doederlein and Richard Osbaldeston in the comments on Java 7 Update is worth reading.
• Remy Rakic has been hard at work trying to decipher the JavaFX internals and allow embedding JavaFX content in Swing top-level windows. The code is linked here, and you can see a sample screenshot of embedded content here.
• Clemens Eisserer continues his work on XRender pipeline (scheduled to be part of Java 7 – congratulations), reporting that most of the native C code has been ported to pure Java2D.
• Roman Kennke is another winner of OpenJDK Innovators’ Challenge, and he continues his work as well. He provides a UML architecture overview of Caciocavallo project, and talks about enhancements to managed windows.
• Jeremy Wood tackles the problem of exporting layered vector-based graphics to a serializable format.

Finally, Mikael Grev has announced release 3.6.2 of MigLayout manager for Swing and SWT. Mikael has been vigorously pushing for inclusion of this project in the core JDK distribution, amassing an impressive number of 289 votes in the bug parade. I am not quite convinced that it will be a good match. Looking at the available release notes history (since June 08), i see quite a few bugs being fixed (even this very announcement was made on version 3.6.1, with a bug creeping in requiring another minor release), as well as improving support for IDE integration. This is a perfectly normal situation for any project, even when the APIs are frozen as far as the project developers are concerned. Would you want to forego quick bug fixing cycle for a larger audience? Would you want to risk the restrictions of JDK (never breaking the APIs) even you are positively sure right now that this is the final state? These and other related questions don’t have a definitive answer (to witness quite a few API disasters in the core JDK), and tomorrow’s interview (not related to MigLayout) will provide an interesting take.