Another quiet week, and one in which I have been somewhat distracted with SCJP study (exam on Wednesday!). Despite this, below is the important news for the Java desktop that has occured in the last week.
Swing
- Jean-Francois Poilpret has been very busy in the last week, releasing version 1.1 of his DesignGridLayout layout manager for Swing. This release brings the multiple rows span components feature he has discussed in the past, as well as a number of bug fixes and enhancements.
- Another post by Jean-Francois relays his experience with Swings JInternalFrame and JDesktopPane components, and the special requirements he discovered for handling them properly to ensure the user experience is up to Swings normal high quality.
- Mark Graybill has posted a simple and clear example of how to rotate an image in Java2D.
- Swing 2.0 continues to move along. Swing 2.0 now has a clear vision of the direction of the project, and after a bit of discussion its focus is now on refactoring a fork of the current Swing codebase.
JavaFX
- Michael Galpin, a software architect at eBay, has posted an article on IBMs developerWorks site that discusses how to create mashups with JavaFX. I would say that this would be very useful for JavaFX developers out there wanting to get their head around connecting to web services, and parsing the data coming from them.
- Josh Marinacci, of Sun Microsystem, has set up a new website, JFXStudio, that aggregates a number of blogs related to JavaFX development. Its focus is on showing demonstration programs and the associated code. This will be a good resource for JavaFX developers!
- Speaking of Josh Marinacci (his ears must be burning), RIA Weekly had him as a phone-in guest on their latest show, where he discusses the current and future state of JavaFX. It's worth listening to if you have a moment.
- Stephen Chin has announced JFXtras 0.3 has been released. This release adds support for JavaFX 1.1, plus includes a JavaFX version of MigLayout for doing layout of JavaFX Nodes. Because JavaFX 1.1 is not binary compatible with JavaFX 1.0, you will have to upgrade to this release if you want to use JFXtras for JavaFX 1.1 development.
- There is an article on Wikia that discusses how to add Swing components into JavaFX applications. This is very good and clear, focusing on the necessary code required for each component.
That's it for this week! Now, back to my study - two more days to go :-) Have a great week!
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