Java desktop links of the week, August 31

Another week, another Java desktop links post. This week there is a fair bit of interesting news, but before I begin, I’d love to ask if people who read this can check if their name is obvious in their blog posts. It is tough having to search for them, and as shown a few times in this post, I’ve only got your first name, pseudonym, or domain name. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have your name printed than any of these.

Now – Let’s get into the news

General

• Joe Darcy blogs about the progress being made in Project Coin, which is the project for small language changes for Java 7. In his latest blog, he announces the final five (or so) that have been accepted into the project, and for which a JSR will be created. Of course people have their opinions, but just looking at the list I’m pretty happy and excited about the small language improvements coming in Java 7 (although the Elvis operator and improved exception handling would have been nice too).

Swing

• Ken Orr put out a HUD-style slider for his Mac Widgets for Java project. It is a very nice looking, minimalist component that goes well with all the other components he has been blogging about recently.
• Rob has a blog post detailing AWTEventListener, which allows you to listen to all events throughout your entire application using one global listener.
• If you want to persist the state of a JXTable between runs of your application, and you are using the Swing App Framework, you might be interested in the code in the blog by Carsten Oland. However, I’ve done this in the last week in an application, and I didn’t use SAF, yet the code was still simple and straightforward. Therefore – if you aren’t using SAF, don’t feel you need to just to persist JXTable state.
• Itexto.net blogs about finding the position of the character at the position of the carat in a JEditorPane.
• Jeremy blogs about a new Button API he has been working on. He even has a working demo of his buttons included in the post – give it a go.
• In another post, Jeremy has an application demoing transitions he has created in Java.

JavaFX

• Stephen Chin notes that it’s the final day for the WidgetFX contest. Time to put any finishing touches on your widgets.
• Dean Iverson has a Dance Battle between Flex 4 and JavaFX 1.2. Dean compares his experiences and thoughts between Flex 4 and JavaFX 1.2. It is an interesting read and well recommended, especially if you’d like a side-by-side comparison of how a simple demo is written in both languages.
• I’ve missed a number of phone interviews conducted by Chhandomay Mandal at Sun, and I only realised they existed when I was interviewed. Therefore, for those interested, here are some of the interesting interviews: Fabrizio Giudici, Sten Anderson, Evgeni Sergeev, Stephen Chin, and Jonathan Giles.
• Robert Eckstein blogs about Mixins in JavaFX 1.2.
• Sun have had their Tech Test Train application available for people to learn JavaFX with. A new release has just been put out, so if you’re wanting to learn JavaFX, this is (apparently) a good way to do it. Unfortunately on my machine it just crashes out, so I’ve never played it.
• Jim Conners blogs about registering multiple actions (or handlers) in JavaFX.
• Anton Polyakov blogs about his experience in building a JavaFX GUI for a Seam booking application. This is built using the Exadel Flamingo application, which “is a tool for easily integrating rich UIs (so far, JavaFX and Flex) into Seam and Spring back ends”.
• Phoenix has a blog post detailing the ‘9 Best JavaFX Photo Gallery Applicatons‘. Most of these apps have source code included, so if you’re wanting to learn more about image handling in JavaFX, you should definitely check these out.

Griffon

• Andres Almiray posts to say that the Transitions plugin for Griffon has been released. This plugin allows for animated transitions to be easily included in your own applications. Just remember that animations work best when they are subtle and relevant (i.e. don’t go crazy)

That’s it for another week. Have a great week and I’ll catch you again in a week.