A pretty good news week this one, but because it’s a public holiday here in New Zealand, and I’d rather be enjoying the sun, I’m cutting straight to it. Enjoy!
General
- Josh Marinacci has blogged about an important topic in user interface design – Colour (although he unfortunately calls it ‘color’
). He goes into the background and science of colour, and it’s well worth a read for anyone tasked with building compelling user interfaces.
Swing
- Coming out of left field this week was PureSwing, which looks to be the best contender for the Swing 2.0 that I discussed earlier in the year. This looks to be a very interesting project, and one which I hope to see further discussion around in the coming days as people explore it.
- Kirill Grouchnikov clearly had Flamingo on his mind this week, with two blog posts discussing how he has enhanced the ribbon application menu in Flamingo 4.2, and improvements to the command buttons in Flamingo to support buttons with no text and/or graphic.
- IBM developerWorks has an article on writing Swing user applications with JRuby.
- Java.net interviewed André van Kouwen, founder of a new java.net project, GMVC. GMVC claims to expedite Swing application development and best practices by using Generic Views, Models and Generic Controllers.
- The Better Swing Application Framework announced the milestone 2 release of BSAF 1.9. As noted on their website, BSAF is a fork of the Swing Application Framework (JSR 296). Primary goals for the upcoming release: improve stability, keep backward compatibility with last public release of the SAF (1.03), bug fixing, documentation update (javadoc, introduction), unit tests update, examples update.
JavaFX
- Having just popped up before putting this post out, I haven’t watched this yet, but Peter Pilgrim has given a talk titled ‘Enterprise JavaFX for the web platform‘ that may be interesting to people out there.
- IDE support is starting to improve for JavaFX, with both Eclipse and NetBeans getting newer / beta plugin releases. For NetBeans, it is 6.8 beta, which includes improved code completion, editor hints and navigation. The beta is available now, with the final release due in December. Additionally, the Exadel JavaFX Studio 1.1 plugin for Eclipse has been released, which includes much of the same functionality, but obviously for Eclipse. Now that I’m developing for Sun, I use NetBeans, but man do I miss Eclipse. Perhaps when I start reading some good reviews for either of the two Eclipse plugins, I’ll give them a try again.
- Some guy called James Gosling posted a JavaFX-based map browser that he used when presenting at Oracle OpenWorld recently. You can find out more at the Kenai project page.
- Sten Anderson blogged about Music Explorer FX Mobile Edition, which is a port of his award-winning Music Explorer FX to work on JavaFX-enabled mobile devices.
- Stephen Chin announced a new release of WidgetFX, which includes a new slideshow widget, improved support for 64-bit and international operating systems, and of course bug fixes.
- Eric Wendelin blogged about the technology behind Cheqlist, which I referred to last week. Cheqlist is a JavaFX application that connects to the online Remember The Milk web service.
Special Bonus Link
- Because I’m feeling generous and because it’s a public holiday here in New Zealand, here’s a special bonus link that isn’t directly desktop related, but you really should go to it anyway. It’s one of many overviews of the Google Collections library, which you should all be using as it is an absolutely great library.
As always, have a great week everyone, and keep up all the hard work.
Wow – this is perhaps the most balanced post in the last four – five months. Between the various sections, we have news this week on Swing, JavaFX, Griffon, NetBeans RCP and a general animation library (commonly used for Swing and SWT). There must be a little bit of news for everyone this week!
General
Swing
- Kirill also posted a roadmap for Substance 6.0. The main goals are to remove deprecated methods / classes, restructure the code base, (including renaming packages), and moving animations to use the Trident animation library. In other words, get ready to complain that Substance doesn’t immediately work for you in version 6.0
- Anthony Goubard posted an overview of the new color chooser in JDK7. The comments quickly devolve to the point where people are suggesting improvements and alternatives. I would have to agree – the color chooser in JDK 7 isn’t the nicest looking at all.
- I came across a ‘new’ LGPL docking framework for Swing this week, after it was discussed on twitter. It is called DockingFrames, and may be of some interest to people evaluating the various Swing docking frameworks out there.
- JxBrowser 2.0 was announced this week, and it is now at the point where an Early Access Program is underway. JxBrowser is a cross-platform library that allows integrating Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari (WebKit) and Microsoft Internet Explorer browsers into Java AWT/Swing applications on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X platforms. Note that it is not a free library.
JavaFX
Griffon
That’s another week down. Keep firing me your links if you think you’ve found something useful – it’s always much appreciated. Keep up the good work everyone. Until next week – stay classy!
A heap of news this week, covering Swing, JavaFX and a little bit of Griffon. Let’s get straight into it.
General
- Peter Karich has written a blog post that contains links to most well-known Java (client) application frameworks. This might be a good research to people starting a new client application to consider what framework they want to use, if any.
Swing
JavaFX
- Jim Weaver has announced a competition for people to pair up (one designer, one developer) to design and develop a JavaFX enterprise RIA example application. The prize is $2000US, split evenly between the designer and the developer.
- Jasper Potts blogged the code for his radial word clock entry into the JFXStudio ‘time’ challenge. The end result is quite a nice application.
- Speaking of the JFXStudio coding challenge, the next theme has already been announced: ‘five‘. The challenge is to write an application with this theme in 30 lines of code, or 3000 characters in total.
- Josh Marinacci has blogged about a new tool he has developed called SideHatch, which is an early proof-of-concept JavaFX debugging tool.
- Stephen Chin blogged about his JUG SpinnerWheel, which continues Stephen’s experiments into pseudo-3D user interfaces (following his entry into the JFXStudio ‘time’ challenge).
- Nick (who’s last name isn’t clear, but appears to be another Kiwi) has blogged about what he believes is next for JavaFX (i.e. in the Soma release). All I can really add is that just because a control is targetted toward Soma, it doesn’t mean that the control is necessarily going to be public. This will most probably mean the control will be in a com.sun.* package for use, but it is clearly considered experimental.
- Johan Vos has blogged about using JavaFX with OSGi.
- Drew from piliq.com has blogged more about his Clash game, and how the user interface is evolving.
Griffon
That’s us for another week. Keep out of (too much) trouble, and I’ll see you again next week
Here’s all the latest news that you may have missed in the last week. Enjoy!
General
Swing
JavaFX
- The JFXStudio challenge of writing a 30 line (or 3000 character) application with the theme of ‘time’ is heating up now over, and the winner has been announced.. A number of people have posted their code for the challenge, including Stephen Chin, Carl Dea, Muhammad Hakim, Sergey Surikov, Vinu and Philippe Lhoste.
- Dean Iverson, one of the four authors of Pro JavaFX Platform, was recently interviewed by Reviews Interactive. You can listen to or read the interview to hear Dean’s thoughts on a number of issues.
- You can watch Sten Anderson be interviewed on the topics of JavaFX and Music Explorer FX, his winning entry into the JavaFX coding competition earlier this year.
- Speaking of Sten, he just released the animated chart library that he has previously blogged about. You can check out the bottom of this blog post to download the code.
- Jeff Frieson has written an article on the JavaFX scrollbar control.
- SoftDevTube.com has posted a video titled “JavaFX Rich Internet Applications Connected to GlassFish Java EE 5 services“.
Have a great week everyone. Please keep posting me any news you might have, and I’ll see you all again in a weeks time.
