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

• Chris Adamson provides his own take on my interview with Richard Bair, particularly highlighting Richard’s statement that JavaFX is effectively Swing 2.0. This has also been picked up by Josh Fruhlinger at Javaworld.
• Devoxx has brought some news about the future of SwingX and Swing in JDK 7. As reported by Jan Haderka, Alexander Potochkin will be replacing Richard as the official SwingLabs project lead. In addition, some of the SwingLabs sub-projects will be part of JDK 7. This includes App Framework, JXLayer, Painters API and DatePicker. A gigantic missing piece is the BeansBinding, and this is already being queried by the community – update: see what Richard had to say about this. Another interesting piece is concerning the inclusion of painters, and how they will play with Nimbus’ own painters, as well as the level of possible customization of core Swing components.
• Christopher Deckers has announced release 0.9.7 of DJ Sweet project that aims to bring sophisticated components for SWT. The main focus in this release is the improvement of the Web Browser control, and the addition of a Flash Player with a simple API.
• Alexey Ushakov is the technical lead for JWebPane component, and he has finally revealed tentative availability schedule for this project. Contrary to my prediction, it looks that this component will be lightweight, providing Java2D-based implementation of WebKit painting hooks. Alexey’s comment on licensing issue is questionable at best, and has been discussed briefly by Remy Rakic.
• Alex Ruiz is writing about an interesting usage of FEST Swing library – to analyze the UI hierarchy of JavaFX applications.
• A few months ago there was significant blogosphere activity around using Swing as a foundation to build UIs in JVM-powered languages, such as JRuby, Scala, Jython and Groovy. Unfortunately only one camp has remained steadily active throughout the time – congratulations to Groovyheads for persisting in analyzing the deficiencies of pure Swing development and pushing the envelope. Danno Ferrin has announced release 0.1 beta of Griffon, and Andres Almiray writes about plugin support in Griffon. Andres is also busy experimenting with the builder support for both core Swing and third-party Swing components, and this weeks he has announced two new sub-projects, SwingPad and FlamingoBuilder.
• After last week’s entry on skinning the JScrollBar component, Ken Orr laments the lack of visual tools for assisting the creation of Swing look-and-feels and hopes to see the Nimbus designer released soon. In the comments, Remy Rakic speculates that it will be soon morphed into JavaFX designer.
• Jeremy Wood delves into Java2D, presenting an extensible implementation of charcoal stroke.

And now for the spotlight of the week. Java IDEs such as NetBeans and IDEA has frequently been quoted as examples of large Swing based applications. In the consumer-facing market, perhaps the most widely used application is LimeWire. This week the developers of LimeWire have announced the first alpha drop of the next release. The first two blog entries are out, and hopefully will be followed by more details on the technical implementation and integration of such libraries as SwingX components and painters, Glazed Lists, MigLayout and XULRunner. Click on the thumbnail to see a larger screenshot of LimeWire 5.0alpha.

The latest addition in the Flamingo component suite is support for key tips. This has been one of the items on the roadmap for version 4.0 (code named Fainnear), and is now available in the latest 4.0dev drop of Flamingo core and 5.1dev drop of Substance Flamingo plugin.

Key tips is one of the four supported ways to operate the Office 2007 ribbon with keyboard. Unlike the traditional menus-and-toolbars system, every command and control in ribbon can have associated key tip. This allows efficient access and activation of application menu items, task toggle buttons, task bar buttons, task expand buttons and other ribbon sub-components. As specified in the keyboard documentation, the key tip mode is initiated with either Alt or F10 key. Subsequent interaction will be illustrated in the screenshots below taken under the latest 4.0dev drop of Flamingo core and Synthetica Mauve Metallic skin.

Key tips are shown in groups (internally called chains). A key tip group is associated with the specific ribbon entity. When the key tip mode is initiated, the key tip group for the entire ribbon is displayed. It contains key tips for the application menu button, taskbar components and task toggle buttons:

Pressing the letter for taksbar button activates that button. Key tips for disabled buttons are painted with partial translucency. Pressing the letter for task toggle button selects the matching ribbon task. Pressing the letter for the application menu button shows the application menu:

Once the next key tip group is shown, the previously shown key tip group is hidden (no key tips on the application menu button and taskbar buttons in this screenshot). Pressing Esc dismisses the currently shown key tip group and shows the previous key tip group. When the initial key tip group is dismissed, the key tip mode is exited.

This screenshot also shows that the menu buttons can have two key tips associated with them – one for the action, and one for the popup. Pressing ‘D‘ (associated with the popup “Send” button) shows the second level menu, switching off the key tips for the first level and showing them for the second level:

Pressing keys ‘E‘, ‘H‘ or ‘W‘ will activate the relevant second level menu buttons. Pressing key ‘X‘ activates the popup menu associated with the “Wireless” menu button:

Going back to the first screenshot (that shows the top level key tip group). Pressing key ‘P‘ shows the key tip group for the first (and currently selected) ribbon task:

The key tips are shown for ribbon buttons, task expand buttons (look for ‘FO‘ and ‘FN‘), ribbon gallery expand buttons (look for ‘L‘) and buttons in button strips (in the “Font” ribbon band). As you can see, some key tips have two letters. This can be useful not only when there are not enough letters for the contents of the current task. It can also help in grouping key tips of related functionality (such as alignment and indentation command buttons in the “Font” ribbon band that start with A). In the present situation, when letter ‘F‘ is pressed, only key tips that start with that letter are shown:

As before, pressing Esc will show the previous key tip group – in this case, it would be key tips for the entire “Page Layout” ribbon task.

Key tips are also shown in popup menus. Pressing ‘V‘ when the key tips for the entire first ribbon task are shown activates the popup menu of the “Paste” button:

Pressing one of the relevant keys will activate the matching menu button, dismissing the key tip mode as well. Key tips are also shown for the menu buttons in rich popup panels:

Here, in order to activate the “Save Selection”, you would have to press the following sequence of keys:

• Alt or F10 to activate the key tip mode
• P to select the first ribbon task
• F, P to show the popup of the “Format” button in the “Clipboard” ribbon task
• S, S to activate the “Save Selection” menu button

As you can see, the sequence to activate a specific command can be quite long. As such, commands that are used often need to be identified and associated with shorter (and perhaps more memorable) sequences.

The APIs to associate key tips with different ribbon components are:

• AbstractCommandButton.setActionKeyTip
• JCommandButton.setPopupKeyTip
• JRibbonBand.setExpandKeyTip
• JRibbonBand.setRibbonGalleryExpandKeyTip
• RibbonApplicationMenuEntry.setActionKeyTip
• RibbonApplicationMenuEntry.setPopupKeyTip
• JRibbon.setApplicationMenuKeyTip
• RibbonTask.setKeyTip

If you want to see the scrolling in action under the core look-and-feels, run the following WebStart demo:

If you want to see this functionality under Substance, run the following WebStart demo:

If you want to test the new functionality in your applications, you would need the following (the last two only for applications running under Substance look-and-feel):

• The latest 4.0dev drop of Flamingo (code-named Fainnear)
• The latest 5.1dev drop of Substance (code-named Panama)
• The latest 5.1dev drop of Substance Flamingo plugin

Your feedback is, as always, greatly appreciated.

A03 is a third-party Swing look-and-feel developed by Davide Raccagni and available under BSD license. Today Davide has announced release 4.0 of A03, with the main emphasis on performance. One of the tools he used during the development cycle is the LightBeam testbed that aims to assist in performance analysis of look-and-feels, as well as rendering pipelines.

Here are the results for the different core and third-party look-and-feels, as measured on my machine (without hardware acceleration that makes some of the scenarios run by up to 40% faster) – lower numbers mean faster performance:

• 3039 Metal
• 3721 Windows
• 4004 Looks PlasticXP
• 4332 Nimbus
• 4665 Substance 5.1
• 4902 A03
• 4908 Synthetica Base

In addition to performance improvements, Davide has also worked with me over the last few weeks to provide support for Flamingo components. Not only does the A03 Flamingo plugin provide fine-tuned visuals to some of Flamingo’s components, it also allows A03-powered JRibbonFrames to host the application menu button, taskbar panel and contextual task groups on the title pane under decorated mode. In doing so, A03 has joined Substance in providing streamlined visuals for the interested applications.

Below you can find a few screenshots of JRibbon and JRibbonFrame under A03 – click to see the full-sized versions.

The first screenshot shows the default content of the test ribbon shipped with Flamingo:

The next screenshot shows the activated application menu button:

The next screenshot shows the rich popup panel associated with a command button:

The next screenshot shows the extended tooltip associated with a command button in the taskbar panel:

The last screenshot shows the contextual task group headers:

Davide – congratulations on the release, and thanks for providing feedback on the extensibility points of the core Flamingo UI delegates.

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

• Gregg Bolinger combines two projects, JavaBuilders and client-objects, to enable automatic data-binding in YAML-driven Swing and SWT applications.
• InfoQ’s Charles Humble shares his thoughts on SwingX and core Swing in his followup to my earlier entry.
• The client heavyweight Joe Winchester wonders whether Swing should provide a way to automatically detect and flag long-running I/O operations that are blocking the UI thread. While i showed techniques for tracing long-running EDT operations before, Swing (and any other UI toolkit, as a matter of fact) could benefit greatly by making sure that programmers don’t shoot themselves in the foot. SWT does this to some extent by throwing exceptions on any UI related operation happening outside the UI thread. Substance closes some of the core Swing gaps by throwing runtime exceptions on component creation and some model changes – a move that has so far generated the most user resistance.
• Eugene Ryzhikov shares a tip on minimizing maintenance of table models.
• Piet Blok dives deeper into the JXLayer project and shows how to use it to create a generic ZoomUI functionality.
• Ken Orr keeps the promise and has started a series on skinning the scroll bar component.

Quite a few releases announced this week:

• Richard Kennard has published a LiveDemo of his MetaWidget project that allows you to start playing and coding with the project.
• Deane Richan has announced the availability of HTML TableLayout project that was previously part of the Xito Dialog project. It is rather unfortunate that (as usual) the comments section quickly degenerates into “i prefer” discussion of other layout managers.
• Manuel Kaess has published AlbumPlayer, a new cross-platform Swing-based media player.
• Clemens Eisserer has released version 0.6 of his JXRenderMark benchmark to measure the performance of his XRender pipeline for accelerating Java2D performance.
• Jean Francois Poilpret has announced the final release 1.0 of the DesignGridLayout project.
• Alex Ruiz has announced release candidate for version 1.0 of FEST-Swing UI testing library.

Devoxx 2008 has started today, and it has a few Swing related presentations:

• Jeanette Winzenburg on SwingX
• Richard Bair and Jan Haderka on SwingLabs
• Alexander Potochkin on JXLayer
• Maxim Zakharenkov on Swing Explorer
• James Williams on Griffon
• David Gilbert on JFreeChart
• Michael Huttermann on UI testing

With not a single feature from my JavaFX “look forward to” list available in the first release, it’s time to see what Sun is going to announce at Devoxx. Over the last few weeks there has been significant (in number of dozens) amount of submitted and closed bug reports in integration between heavyweight and lightweight components for the first two builds of 6u12. Risking yet another prediction (the one about JDK / module / OSGi was quite right, and the main discrepancies are already being criticized by the OSGi community), i would say that the web browser component is in the works, but as a heavyweight implementation. This would require closer cooperation with the (lightweight) rest of the UI toolkit. Share your thoughts in the comments.