Swing links of the week, January 13th

Given that I am heavily engaged in the development of Java Swing-based applications, and the recent 'freezing' of Kirill's blog posts regarding popular Swing news, I thought I would try my best to pick up the slack.

I think it is probably worthwhile that I quickly state that my interests are primarily in Swing, so I am not overly up with the play in other areas that Kirill frequently blogged about, such as JavaFX and Groovy. Regardless, I will try my best, and if you have any news, please post it to me at [email protected]. Without any further ado, here are some Swing links you might have missed in the past week:

• A few years ago the Swing team made Aerith, which demoed various cool things that could be done with Swing. This week the Aerith Netbeans project was announced by Julian Gamble. This project strips out the major components of Aerith, and makes them available to all Swing developers. There is also a number of videos which introduce you to this project.
• Jean-Francois Poilpret has announced the RC1 release of DesignGridLayout. Any new layout to the Swing world is generally much appreciated, given the lack of development of new layouts since Swing was first developed. I should also link to JGoodies Forms layout (which I use heavily), and MiG Layout (which I have yet to use).
• Speaking of layouts, Amy Fowler has posted a blog post about layouts for JavaFX.
• Alex Ruiz continues his blog series on testing JavaFX user interfaces with part 3 (part 1 and part 2 are also available). The testing is accomplished using his FEST Swing DSL-oriented Swing testing library.
• Osvaldo Pinali Doederlein has posted a blog post attempting to clarify JavaFX FUD that exists. I think he clarifies that Swing and JavaFX, whilst competing in some senses, have different focuses also - JavaFX can be far more lightweight, allowing for it to be used in mobile devices far more readily than Swing will ever be.
• And finally, everyones favourite blogger Joel Spolsky posted a blog about the wordy Java installation process. I agree that there is a job for someone within Sun to run through all these dialogs and try to simplify and clarify the message that Sun portrays to the outside world.