Java desktop links of the week, March 2nd

Wow – it’s March already – where does time go? Here are the links from the last week that I think were important – as always, email/twitter/courier pigeon me any news that you think is relevant. Have a great week!

Swing

• As always, Alex Ruiz (@alexRuiz) has been busy, this week announcing the 1.1 release of FEST-Swing which is a Java library that provides a fluent interface for functional Swing GUI testing.
• Ken Orr has announced that he will be at JavaOne, presenting on the topic of component-oriented design. This will be an interesting talk, given the inheritance-oriented design that went into Swing, and the issues that has created, particularly in terms of method-overload.
• Elliott Hughes gave the Swing 2.0 counter-argument this week, suggesting that the point of Swing 2.0 is misguided and irrelevant. For the purposes of proper and full discourse, I appreciate his post, although I wish he had comments enabled so that a discussion could occur.

JavaFX

• Michael Heinrichs has posted the third in his series of blog posts about best practices for JavaFX mobile. I never knew of this blog until now. The first post suggests to avoid unnecessary bindings, the second post suggests to keep the scenegraph as small as possible, and the third post has two tips: use simple shapes over images, and use small shapes over complex shapes.
• More demos have been developed to show off the ease of developing in JavaFX. JFXStudio has a simple ‘sink a ship’ game, Sergey Malenkov has posted a demo that creates a fireworks display (which Kirill Grouchnikov (@kirillcool) recreated in his Trident animation framework), and Santiago Pericas-Geertsen has created a Space Invaders-esque game for JavaFX.

Griffon

• Andres Almiray (@aalmiray) announced the release of Griffon 0.1-RC2. Griffon is a Grails like application framework for developing desktop applications in Groovy.

That’s it for this week! A very sparse news week, so if I’ve missed anything, please let me know! Have a great week.