Java desktop links of the week, May 25

A pretty quiet week this week, as everyone is building up to JavaOne I guess. Regardless, there has been some things worth noting. So, for another week, let’s get started on the news that’s going on in the Java desktop world.

General

• I haven’t really covered it here at all, but over the last week Sun announced Project Vector, which is essentially an app store for Java / JavaFX applications. It has the potential to be a huge player in the app store market, given the wide availability of Java. Jonathan Schwartz has a good overview of what it is that they are doing , and Mikael Grev today posted his thoughts on the hurdles ahead for Sun . To be fair, I haven’t given the app store concept much attention. I think it could be a hugely beneficial thing for the Java ecosystem, and could truely help to re-invigorate desktop Java. I hope for this reason that it is a huge success. So, my call to everyone who reads this – do your best to seriously consider the Sun app store. Make it clear to Sun that desktop Java is huge, and needs their attention and support.

Swing

• I was emailed this morning about Feedjii , a very nice RSS reader written in Swing. It was developed by Pär Sikö and Martin Gunnarsson , with more information available in this post . There is also a webstart link . Finally, these two are giving a talk at JavaOne about this application, the talk being "Swing Rocks – A Tribute to Filthy Rich Clients" (TS-5072).
• As per usual, Kirill Grouchnikov has been busy. This week he has published four blog posts on animation, and has just put out new releases of laf-widget, flamingo, and substance, including its many plugins. The announcement for these new releases is due out on his website in the next day or two, but you can already download the final release from the CVS repositories.
• Meanwhile, Kirill has been updating the documentation surrounding his Trident timing framework .
• Speaking of the Trident timing framework, Rémy Rakic posts an article that details how he added Swing event triggers, making it possible to link run Trident when a UI event occurs .
• Ken Orr posts about making a better JTable , particularly when on the Mac, but also on most other platforms. If you ever use JTables in your applications, heed his advice!
• The Limewire blog continues to post interesting articles. This time they post an article detailing how they developed a range slider in Swing which supports setting both a lower and upper bound . Similar components exist in Jide etc, but this looks to be an excellent component for people without access to Jide libraries.

JavaFX

• Continuing on from last weeks article, Haining Henry Zhang posts the second part in his series that aims to build Pac-Man in JavaFX .
• Alexandr Scherbatiy posts about performing matrix-vector multiplication using JavaFX .
• Muhammad Hakim posts an article detailing how he made a simple ‘pie menu’ with fisheye animation effects in JavaFX.

Griffon

• Andres Almiray posts that Griffon 0.1.1 has been released . Griffon is a Grails like application framework for developing desktop applications in Groovy. In another post, Andres announces that some of the builder projects have been updated to use newer libraries from Jide and the Flamingo project .

That’s it. Have a great week, and for those of you coming to JavaOne, I look forward to catching up. Thanks for all the emails about wanting to catch up – it’s going to be a great week!