Wow. This week a lot of other Java toolkits get a mention, including SWT, Pivot, Groovy, and QT Jambi. Things are feeling a little splintered in the Java desktop world (which to me is a little sad – I’d much rather everyone get behind one or two libraries instead of needlessly duplicating effort). Despite this, it’s open source, and people are welcome to scratch their itches.
Without further ado, here we go – I hope you enjoy!
General
- Not strictly desktop related, but very useful nonetheless is the news that Java 7 will support watching directories for changes. Sharon Zakhour posts a comprehensive overview of this new feature in NIO2 .
- Taranfx posts an overview of Java VisualVM . I highly recommend you watch the video on the site.
Swing
- Kirill Grouchnikov has been stupidly busy this week. He announced new release candidate releases for Substance 5.2 and Flamingo 4.1 . He also features a guest post from Michael Kneebone talking about the Laf-widget project . Finally, Kirill announced Project Onyx which aims to provide blueprints for adding animation to Swing applications (using his Trident timing framework).
- A bug has been fixed in Java which resulted in deadlocks when using a JFileChooser in a particular way .
- Rob Camick posts a brief overview of custom painting in Java .
JavaFX
- Magnus Robertsson posts about transparent binding between JavaFX and POJOs using aspect-oriented programming .
- Vaibhav gives a few pointers on how to improve the user experience when developing JavaFX applications . He also posts a JavaFX script that retrieves a new picture from NASA each day .
- Jim Connell posts about building an analytics dashboard with JavaFX .
- Fabrizio Giudici posts some sample code on building a more Swing-looking JavaFX application .
- Chui posts how to get custom cursors in JavaFX , even when the image is smaller than the required 32×32.
SWT
- mkyong.com posts a demo of a Hello World application in SWT .
Groovy
- Andres Almiray posts that FlamingoBuilder 0.2 has been released . FlamingoBuiilder is a member of the SwingBuilder family of builders, it lets you take advantage of the Flamingo component suite.
QT Jambi
- QT Jambi 4.5.0_01 has been released . This is the final feature release of QT Jambi by QT Software.
Apache Pivot
- Greg Brown posts part 3 of an overview of Apach Pivot 1.1. Pivot is a Java-based RIA toolkit that is currently undergoing incubation at the Apache Software Foundation. Part 3 explains how Pivot can be used to implement support for "push" notifications in a web application using the Jabber instant messaging API. Part 2 of the series demonstrated Pivot’s new support for browsing the local file system . Part 1 of the series discusses Pivot’s support for drag and drop .
Have a great week everyone.
You don’t get enough credit for maintaining this list, so here it is: Good work and thank you!
Your kind words are very much appreciated – this is the reason I do this weekly wrapup. Thank you, you’ve made my day
Thanks a lot, Jonathan!