Java desktop links of the week, June 29

To everyone reading and commenting on my blog – thanks – you help make the world go round Here we go again.

General

• Kirill Grouchnikov posted a 10-part series on his Trident animation library for Java. Fortunately, his last post was an overview which provides details about each of the parts, and also an overview of where Trident is going. Trident can be used in both Swing and SWT. Finally, Kirill posts about his work towards using Trident to augment reality by firing fireworks out of paper based on the papers location.

Swing

• Maxim Zakharenkov emailed me to remind me of a major oversight I made – SwingX 1.0 was released during JavaOne. This is major news for the SwingX project, as it is now planning to shift gears and become Java 6 based, which will allow for a lot of redundant code to be removed from the library.
• Ken Orr released Mac Widgets for Java 0.9.5, which adds a few new components and plenty of bug fixes. You can see examples of the components here.
• In another post, Ken Orr posts how to work around BasicTableUI’s lack of a prepareRenderer hook. This is relevant if you want to customise how a JTable looks in Java.
• Matt Hicks posts a short demonstration on how to use JMC in a Swing application.

JavaFX

• Richard Bair posted an article on FXExperience.com that discusses background tasks in JavaFX.
• Josh Marinacci posts an overview of how to use the JavaFX Production Suite. It is a very good overview video and well worth watching, even if you don’t ever plan to use it.
• In another video, Josh posts a demo of ‘JavaFX Particle-o-rama‘.
• Stephen Chin announced the release of JFXtras 0.5, which is a library any JavaFX developer should get to know, as it fills in a lot of gaps that currently exist in JavaFX.
• Jim Weaver has two articles this week about JavaFX, one discussing how to do dynamic animation timelines, and the other discussing asynchronous tasks in JavaFX 1.2. The thing I find amazing about the second post is the comment that JavaFX can only support 8 parallel tasks – I would love to see a blog post from someone discussing this statement. To me it seems hard to believe.
• One of the features in JFXtras is support for borders. These are developed by James Clarke, and he has a blog post which includes more details.
• John Conner posts an article describing how for-loops differ in JavaFX. It is a useful and short read.
• In another post by John Conner, he discusses binding var and def variables in JavaFX.
• Carl Dea posted three articles on language features in JavaFX Script. The first post discusses the order in which init and postinit blocks are called,  the second post discusses how to set default values in init blocks, and finally the third post discusses implementing a presentation model in JavaFX using bindings.
• Jeff Frieson emailed me to let me know that he has improved the performance of his painters implementation for JavaFX that I linked to last week.
• “What’s new in JavaFX 1.2 technology: new layouts and effects” is the title of an article I missed but that I think is quite good. It was published last month, but it gives a good overview of what is new and noteworthy in JavaFX 1.2.
• If you’re wanting to get to know the nitty-gritty implementation details of JavaFX sequences, you can read up on them in a series of four posts by Per Bothner.
• Rakesh Menon posts an example of drawing a line chart in JavaFX using the new charting components in JavaFX 1.2.
• Mohammed Sanaulla posts a short overview of how to create a simple JavaFX Delicious RSS feed reader in JavaFX.
• The Exadel JavaFX plugin for Eclipse has been updated.
• Once again this week I posted a few things on JavaFX as I continue to  learn and investigate it. This week I posted three articles. Two of them were intended to clarify and provide a mapping between Java and JavaFX concepts. These two posts attempted to clarify public-init and public-read variable declarations and bound functions. The other post discussed borders around controls in JavaFX.

Groovy

• Andres Almiray posted two updates on FxBuilder for Groovy.

Have a great week everyone, and for those of you in the northern hemisphere, enjoy the nice weather – it’s freezing and dark here in New Zealand!