Java desktop links of the week, April 6

Here are your Java desktop links of the week. It's been an interesting week to be a Java developer, given the rumours swirling around a potential acquisition of Sun as soon as this week. Who knows, next weeks post might be SWT links of the week ;-)

Regardless of what happens, have a great week, and don't work too hard.

General

• Danny Coward (@theplanetarium ) put up his second Planet Cast, this time he interviewed James Gosling . To quote Danny, "From Garbage First , through modularity in Java , multiple languages , Swing and JavaFX , this is a must listen episode from the man who started it all." I agree.
• As mentioned last week, Fabrizio Giudici has continued with his 'better beans bindings' project. He has announced a project kenai project .
• Jeff Martin asked me a few weeks ago to mention the (apparently commercial) DataBox project , which appears to be a Java project for creating RIA, but which does not use JavaFX .

Swing

• Eric Burke (@burke_eric ) let me know that the company he works for has put up a document detailing how to skin Eclipse/SWT applications using Swing look and feels .
• Ruben has a post outlining how he believes you should catch Swing runtime exceptions . Basically his suggestion is to provide a wrapper around the event queue such that every event is wrapped in a try-catch block.
• Following up quickly from last weeks post about SwingX 0.9.6 being released, a bug-fix release has been quickly put out for SwingX . This is important if you use the calendar components. The new release is version 0.9.7.
• Do you want native file dialogs in Swing? DJ Native Swing looks like making this a reality. Christopher Deckers has a post detailing how to show native file dialogs .
• Jacek Furmankiewicz has a post outlining how to use his Swing JavaBuilder project to declaratively build Swing user interfaces .

JavaFX

• The 'learn ' page on JavaFX.com is being frequently updated, as alluded to by this blog post, which includes links to a number of tech tips for JavaFX programmers of all skill levels .
• Sergey Malenkov posts an interesting revelation when calling certain Java code from JavaFX . In particular, JavaFX has a number of keywords that are not in Java, such as 'insert', 'delete', etc. Because these are keywords, you can not call a method such as obj.delete(), without first wrapping the delete method call with << and >>, for example: obj.<<delete>>(). I hope that sooner (rather than later) this can be resolved - the JavaFX compiler surely should be able to discern between the two use cases and remove the need for this.
• Josh Marinacci (@joshmarinacci ) posts the winners of the first JavaFX micro-challenge . Not surprisingly, the 3 prizes went to the 3 entrants.
• Jeff Frieson posts how to create a skinnable button in JavaFX .
• JavaFX.com has a tutorial on how to create a media player in JavaFX .
• DevX.com has an article on how to get started with creating JavaFX applications for mobile devices .
• Jim Weaver (@javaFXpert ) posted another JavaFX puzzler , as well as his recommended solution to the puzzler . This puzzler focuses on animation in JavaFX.

Groovy

• Andres Almiray (@aalmiray ) posts that a Griffon book is in the works .