Java desktop links of the week, November 9

A heap of news this week, with a resurgence of Swing links being particularly pleasing to see. Righty – on to the news!

Swing

• SwingX 1.6 was released this week, which is quite an exciting release as it does away with Java 5 backwards compatibility, which allows for the codebase to be cleaned up considerably.
• Kirill Grouchnikov is starting to need his own section these days, but for now I’ll just link to his four posts in the last week. Firstly, he announced the official release of Flamingo 4.2, which is a stabilisation release that adds a few minor features and fixes all known bugs. Secondly, he did two posts on control alignment in Substance, which is the nice attention to detail that most look and feels neglect to pay attention to. Finally, Kirill wrote a Sea Glass skin for Substance, based on the details outlined by Ken Orr and Kathryn Huxtable.
• Marina Kamahele has written an article on java.net about using ‘transparent’ panels to mix heavyweight and lightweight components.
• David Qiao, from JIDE, has announced that JIDE 2.8.0 and JIDE Charts have been released.
• Jean-Francois Poilpret let me know about the Painless-Gridbag project, which attempts to simplify the use of the Gridbag layout in Swing.
• I came across the gtkJFileChooser project this week, which aims to create a JFileChooser that looks consistent with the new file chooser offered in recent Gnome releases (i.e. 2.4+).
• I was recently informed of the PortletDock swing component, which allows you to add a bunch of non-overlapping components to it that can then be rearranged by the user by dragging with the mouse or by minimizing them.

JavaFX

• A new article has been published at javafx.com titled ‘Creating an image slideshow‘, written by Scott Hommel, a technical writer at Sun.
• Stephen Chin has created a Twitter list that follows a good number of people in the JavaFX world.
• In another separate post, Stephen has posted an overview of the new Java App Store.
• Excelsior have a blog advertising their product which allows for the deployment of standalone JavaFX applications without any runtime dependencies.
• Sergey Malenkov has blogged about his entry to the JFXStudio Coding Challenge for the theme of ‘five’. He wrote a rotating dodecahedron, and includes in his blog the details of the maths behind it, for you to try at home.
• Rakesh Menon has blogged about resolution independent UI’s in JavaFX.
• Lucas Jordan has blogged about his experiences with the JavaFX Production Suite.
• Drew from Piliq.com has written an applet that shows off the various blend modes available in JavaFX.
• The Exadel blog has links to two enterprise JavaFX webinars.

That’s us for another week. Keep up the hard work, and I’ll catch you all again next week.