With Christmas behind us and new years to look forward to, I’m surprised by the amount of news coming out this week. In the interests of brevity (I’m sure most of us have holidays to enjoy), let’s get straight into it.
Swing
- If you ever find yourself wanting to show a text prompt in a JTextField, or a ‘search’ graphic, then you may want to check out a blog post by Jeremy that provides code specifically for this use case.
- I came across a layout manager for Swing this week called the Matrix Layout Manager. Without looking too indepth at it it appears to be along the same lines as the JGoodies FormLayout or MigLayout.
- In a talk given to the Münster Java Users Group, Gerrit Grunwald presented on the topic of ‘pimping your Swing user interface‘. On that blog you’ll find mention of some custom components he has created (including the code), as well as a link to the presentation slides which are quite interesting.
- Can’t do without a Swing-based browser any longer? Check out JxBrowser, which has just had its 2.0 release. The only caveat – it’s a sweet €899 per developer license.
- Speaking of Swing-based browsers, there is some mention of NetBeans 6.9 including the mythical JWebPane component. For example, it is detailed on the ‘potentially in 6.9‘ wiki page, and just last month it was tested by the NetBeans team.
JavaFX
- Video from Richard Bair’s talk to the Silicon Valley JavaFX users group was recently posted, which you can watch here if you’re interested.
- Lukas Hasik has posted a screencast of how to use the JavaFX ‘Composer’ plugin in NetBeans.
- Jim Weaver has extended and slightly modified the rules for the JavaFX RIA exemplar competition. The competition deadline is now April 10, 2010, and it is no longer necessary to consist of a team of a programmer and a designer. Get into it as the prize is $2000, and your work will be looked over by a number of big names in the JavaFX world.
- The Exadel blog shows off a currently internal project whereby JavaFX nodes are wrapped up as JSF components, allowing for them to be embedded simply within a JSF site.
- Drew has created a simple calendar control in JavaFX. At present it is just a proof of concept and certainly not a fully fledged control, but it shows the ease in which creating new controls is possible. All I can really add is that JavaFX 1.3 will make customising the appearance much easier, as our ListView control can be skinned far more easily – meaning anything list-like can build upon all the smarts we have put into ListView (and other virtualised controls like Tree and Table).
- Jeff Frieson has posted about reading newsfeeds in JavaFX in his normal code-heavy approach. Another good read if you’re keen to see exactly how to interact with RSS/Atom feeds in JavaFX.
- Rakesh Menon shows how to create a ‘custom window’ in JavaFX, and also how to use JavaFX to represent data coming out of a JDBC database.
Griffon
- Andres Almiray has blogged about how Griffon is moving beyond supporting just Swing to also supporting SWT, JavaFX and now Apache Pivot also.
Catch you in the new year. Have a great new years party and try to step away from the computer for a bit 
My god… I kind of feel bad about that comment… but the ‘pimping your Swing user interface’ slides should REALLY be a perfect example of how to NOT do UIs…
Martin,
I’m a little confused about what you’re trying to say – care to clarify? Feel free to express your opinions
– Jonathan
Martin is absolute right…BUT…the application i created for the talk was only a demonstration what is possible and how you could achieve effects like this in Swing…it was not meant to be a good example for UIs…i told this the people in the talk but might miss to mention it in the slides…
Too bad the author or MaxtrixLayout doesn’t explain why his layout was created. He himself mentions TableLayout (and preferring that name) but not where these two differ.
Jonathan, have you seen my two gauges? Put them online especially for you
http://bit.ly/6is8pS
http://bit.ly/7byC3l
Tom: I did see those links go past my twitter stream, but I assumed that they were in relation to the other Swing components I mentioned in todays post. I didn’t think they were different – so I didn’t bother to run them (well, I did try, but the webstart download was either very big or very slow, so I gave up downloading them).
I just run them now and they are very impressive. I guess the big problem is that they are webstart links, with no associated blog post or source download. Do you plan to provide either of these things? If so, please do flick me an email with the details (or leave a comment here).
Cheers.
Yeah. Blogging. I usually prefer spending my time coding than writing about it.
Good job…really nice gauges…
The Cobra pure Java browswer has been for a couple of years.
http://lobobrowser.org/cobra.jsp
I’ve used it in a commercial application and it works quite well.
It’s also extensible and supports JavaScript, so no need for the expensive components until the free JWebPane comes out.