Swing links of the week, January 18th

Here are some Java GUI-related news items you may have missed in the last week...I hope you enjoy them. If you think I missed anything, let me know in the comments. Have a great week!

• Firstly a post I missed last week: Jacek Furmankiewicz has announced the availability of the Swing JavaBuilder PDF book that aims to provide a more thorough documentation of the project's goals and features.
• Kirill Grouchnikov continues improving his flamingo JRibbon and substance projects, bringing the flamingo look and feel much closer to that of Office 2007. Behind the scenes on the mailing lists he and Andrey Eremchenko have been working very hard to bring the experience of JRibbon much more closer to Office 2007's ribbon.
• Alex Ruiz continues his series on testing JavaFX UIs. This is part four, with the previous three available here (parts 1, 2, 3). This post focuses on automating the build process of a combined Java and JavaFX project using Maven.
• Speaking of Alex Ruiz, he has just announced the avilability of the FEST-Swing 1.0 release. FEST-Swing is a Java library that provides a fluent interface for functional Swing GUI testing. This library provides an easy-to-use API that makes creation and maintenance of GUI tests easy.
• James Sugrue interviews Stephen Chin about his WidgetFX project. WidgetFX is a desktop widget platform written in the JavaFX Script language. It can run widgets written in either JavaFX Script or Java.
• Ken Orr at Exploding Pixels writes about how he managed to write an image to disk, accessing it through the Mac OS NSImage:// protocol.
• Jim Crossley looks at the improvements made to Java Applets in Java 6 Update 10. Yes, I know this is old news, but I thought that this summary was pretty good, and provides a good amount of justification for anyone lingering on older releases to upgrade.
• Jasper Potts has posted a link to his JavaOne 2008 talk about the Nimbus look and feel. I have yet to use Nimbus in any of my Java projects, instead preferring to maintain the look and feel of the current users operating system. This has always been something that has confused me a little - how popular are the custom Sun developed look and feels such as Metal and Nimbus? Is it the best use of engineering resources?
• Are you interested in learning more about JavaFX? If so, Jim Weaver and Sang Shin are running a free '15-Week JavaFX Programming (with Passion!)' online course.
• Jean-Francois Poilpret posts about best practices when doing layouts in Swing. This blog post does tend to focus on his DesignGridLayout layout manager, but even if you aren't using it there are a number of good tips in this post that I recommend all UI designers/developers to follow in their own projects.
• With the availability of LGPL licensing being announced this week for QT, there is some discussion that Java may have just got a brand new components framework, accessible through QT-Jambi. Joe Walnes blog post was the first I saw discussing this. I definitely recommend giving the webstart link a try - it is actually quite impressive, although I'm not 100% certain of QT-Jambi's licensing plans.
• Finally, all developers: heed this advice.

That's it for Swing links this week, I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any links I missed or feedback (both positive and negative), please leave a comment or send me an email. Cheers!