Java desktop links of the week, February 21

Wow - the floodgates really opened up this week, with a heap of interesting links - so many in fact that I had to cut back a few of them as otherwise this post would've just been too long. Thanks to everyone for posting me a link - please keep it up as it's your content that makes these weekly links worthwhile.

General

• The JavaOne call for papers has been open for a few weeks now (or so it seems). The closing date is March 14, so don't miss out! I'm really hoping to be at JavaOne again this year as a roving reporter / one of the developers behind JavaFX, but we'll see. JavaOne this year is September 19-23.
• Rakesh Menon has posted details about the India Tech Days 2010 which take place late March.

Swing

• Kirill Grouchnikov posted a Swing Puzzler asking what you expect following a short snippet of code. I share his sentiment about not liking programming puzzles, which is why I don't think I have ever read my Java Puzzlers book that sits on my bookshelf. I must get around to reading it one day...
• Gerrit  Grunwald continues his posts covering custom components, this time creating a very nice looking clock component.
• Fabrizio Giudici has started up a series of posts discussing his Oracle wishes. His first post discusses his wish for SwingX to once again consider investing and supporting the SwingX project, which is an incubator for a number of interesting and useful Swing components. I've used it extensively and highly rate it.
• Rob Camick posts about 'Formatted Text Field Tips', which is a very good post discussing how to format numbers properly in a text field with carets.
• Eugene Ryzhikov continues his post on minimizing TableModel maintenance by using enums.
• I had assumed that the whole heavy/lightweight Swing issue was resolved, but I've never really been one to mix hw/lw anyway. Regardless, this week Marina Kamahele posts about an issue with setting the opacity of a panel when mixing heavyweight and lightweight components.

JavaFX

• The Silicon Valley JavaFX Users Group posted the video for Hinkmond Wong's 'Mobile Dojo' talk, which I've posted on FX Experience in a slightly larger size. You can also see just the slides at Stephen Chin's blog.
• Richard Bair posted about text transitions following a recent bout of bug triage, where he encountered a requested feature which he's putting back out to the community to try and solve. This is something we occassionally encounter - deciding whether we should develop something internally or rely on third-parties to develop functionality.
• Details about the JavaFX Composer preview 2 release came online this week. I'm not sure if this coincided with the actual preview 2 release or not. JavaFX Composer is a plugin for NetBeans that makes it easy to build JavaFX-based user interfaces (although it's intended for developers moreso than designers, who should use the forthcoming Authoring Tool being developed at Oracle).
• Jonathan Merritt decided to use the JavaFX Charting API to roughly predict when he believes the JavaFX 1.3 release will be. He notes that it was more of a chance to play with the chart components (and linear regression models) than anything else, and he is not in a position to actually know the release date - so take it for what it is. Also, note that his chart can only report on the public issues in the JavaFX bug tracker.
• Geeky coder (I'm assuming that's not his/her real name) posted a JavaFX tip titled 'Reducing development time by running JavaFX application using class file and with JRebel'.
• Jan Goyvaerts posts his thoughts on implementing the Observer pattern in JavaFX.
• It's been a funny old week in JavaFX-land, with both negative posts and positive posts. Being a good link reporter, I'll leave you to make up your own mind.

That's all for another week. Catch you all in a weeks time! Keep up the good work folks :-)