Java desktop links of the week, February 15

The weeks seem to be speeding by these days, and the amount of interesting news each week is only growing. This week there is a number of good reads, which I've linked to below. As always, thanks to the people who email me links, and please feel free to follow me on twitter if you are interested.

Anywho, enough personal links! On with what you came to see. Enjoy :-)

General

• Kas Thomas has a post discussing why he thinks modal dialogs are evil. As he says, and what I believe, is that they aren't completely evil if used in appropriate circumstances. But he does have an example of where they really shouldn't be used.

Swing

• Damien Ielsch continues with his posts, this week with a post titled Bean Reader JTable, discussing how to populate a table of read-only beans.
• Fellow kiwi Nigel Charman has posted about creating executable specifications for Swing apps with Concordian and FEST.

JavaFX

• Lukas Hasik has noted that NetBeans 6.8 Patch 1 has been released. This release includes 36 fixes in the JavaFX area.
• A new article was posted on JavaFX.com that discusses how to profile JavaFX applications using NetBeans.
• In the Sun Developer Network, another article has appeared, titled 'Java Applets, ASP.net - Can you play together?'. No prizes for guessing the topic of this post.
• Jim Conners has posted a good article titled 'JavaFX, Sockets and Threading: Lessons Learnt'.
• Thomas Butter emailed me to let me know of his project to display Open Document Presentation files in JavaFX. It's only an early preview at the moment, but shows real promise.
• Drew has a small update to his game project where he introduces a pause feature, and explains how he integrated it.
• Pedro Duque Vieira has a post which shows off his integration of JavaFX and Swing into a single application.
• Max Katz has a post showing off his work in using JavaFX as a visual display language for JSF pages.
• Rakesh Menon has posted about the download service listener feature that was part of the Java 1.6.0_18 release. As he notes, "it allows you to provide a Custom Progress UI using AWT/Swing/Java2D APIs. It has callback methods which will provide information related to download and validation of resources."
• Jonathan Merritt posted about his experience in getting to know JavaFX, and his eventual realisation that JavaFX is very good.
• Following my mention of the need for more Keyboard Cat JavaFX applications, Simon Morris (author of the JavaFX in Action book) obliged and posted another demo which will draw ripples over a video when you click the mouse.
• kdgregory has a post discussing parts of the JavaFX language that he finds interesting.

Wow, this weeks news certainly appears a little lop-sided, but that's the way it was this past week. Keep up the good work people, and I'll catch you all again in a weeks time.