Java desktop links of the week, July 13

Here is another weeks fresh Java desktop links, served steaming hot straight to you - just the way I know you like it.

Enjoy.

Swing

• Rémy Rakic posts on how he achieved hardware accelerated effects in Swing using JXLayer and Decora.
• Kirill Grouchnikov has an interview with Alex Imrie on the topic of UI testing.
• James Clarke has an article on how to integrate JavaFX into Swing applications. This is a very popular topic and you can find more links in previous Java desktop links of the week posts.
• Dave Gilbert emailed me to let me know of a post which shows how to allow background images to be displayed behind charts.
• Alex Ruiz posts on how to create EDT-safe UI tests in Swing.

JavaFX

• Richard Bair posts an article asking for feedback from people relating to controls 'auto-sizing' when their content changes. Please, if you have any opinions leave a comment on the blog post.
• Amy Fowler responded to my questions from last week, with a detailed blog post explaining layout bounds as they stand in JavaFX 1.2. If you have read anything in the past, I suggest you still read this post as bounds changed considerably betweeen 1.0 and 1.2.
• Related to Amy's post is the boundsizer JavaFX application, which you can find more about here. This is hosted by Stephen Chin.
• Josh Marinacci posts a webstart link to his Particle-O-Rama effects application.
• The JavaFX coding challenge has wrapped up with the winners being announced this week. Congrats to the winners.
• Osvaldo Pinali posts an updated JavaFX Balls benchmark, and writes a lot of information about this in his latest post.
• Steven Herod wants to get your thoughts on the future of TwitterFX. Let him know your thoughts, and feel free to give him a hard time for being an Aussie.
• Jim Weaver has two posts this week, the first discussing using FreeBase to create BandmatesFX, and the second showing off Indaba Console 2.0, which is an internet-based, collaborative recording studio.
• Rakesh Menon posts a blog to warn people to bind with caution. I believe that for the second point mentioned in this post there really should be some kind of isAdjusting variable in Slider so that triggers bound to slider.value can be a little bit more smart, only running compute-intensive tasks when isAdjusting is false.
• Rakesh also posted a combo box control that might be useful to people whilst they wait for a proper control to be introduced in JavaFX.
• In Rakesh's third post of the week, he details how to use storage functionality in JavaFX.
• Last week I mentioned Carl Dea had written part one in a two part series on linking JavaFX and JavaScript. This week he has published part two, and he also made available a demonstration.
• Additionaly, Carl is attempting to maintain a wishlist of JavaFX features on his blog. Personally I would encourage people to post their (considered) request for enhancements directly to the JavaFX-jira issues tracker. Having done this, feel free to trade the JavaFX issue urls, rather than attempt to maintain a separate repository of wishes which won't necessarily ever been seen by anyone with any relevance to JavaFX development.
• Ambika Sukla emailed me to let me know about 'Name the Note', a JavaFX applet designed to make learning to read music easier.
• Jan Goyvaerts posts a code-heavy article on how to do multipart HTTP file uploads using JavaFX.
• Finally, some good looking guy wrote a review of the Pro JavaFX Platform book, which can be read here.

Groovy

• Andres Almiray keeps his blog on all things Groovy churning out the hits, this week with two on GfxBuilder. The first post is about custom nodes, and the second on transforms and plugins.

That's it for another week. Keep up the good work everyone, but for those of you up in the northern hemisphere, get outside and enjoy the sunshine :-)