Java desktop links of the week, February 8

Welcome everyone to another week. This week there are some really interesting posts, so take your time to read through these links below and enjoy :-)

Swing

• Alex Ruiz has posted a very good article on IBM DeveloperWorks discussing debugging and testing Swing code. This is a great read if you feel like you aren't doing enough to test your user interfaces.
• Damien Ielsch has posted some fun code for closing windows using animated transitions. Used subtley, these could provide an interesting feel to appropriate applications.
• Geertjan Wielenga has posted a heap of NetBeans-related posts this week, including 'Create Your Own Window System on the NetBeans Window System', that he integrated MyDoggy (a docking framework) into NetBeans, an interview with developers creating access control software (i.e. fingerprint scanning), and airport management software built on NetBeans. There are other posts, which you can find at Geertjan's blog.
• Kas Thomas carries on with his graphics-related posts, this week talking about implementing perlin noise using his procedural paint code introduced last week. In a separate post he talks about implementing Voronoi tessellation in linear time.

JavaFX

• JavaFX 1.2.3 was released this week. It's a maintenance release only (which means there are no new toys to play with). This release had a focus on improving performance, reliability, and download time. Various bugs have been fixed as well.
• Long time employee of Sun, and great advocate of both Swing and JavaFX, Josh Marinacci, has announced that he is moving on from Sun/Oracle, taking up a position at Palm.
• Simon Morris has posted an interesting tutorial on how to do advanced clipping in JavaFX. Clipping is something that becomes useful once you understand how to use it, so I recommend finding time to read this article.
• Drew from Piliq.com continues his exploration intophysics-based games. This week he posted progress in adding parallax scrolling and custom cursors, and also an entirely new demo game.
• Speaking of physics games, Mikhail Gorshenev has posted a fun version of Tetris that spices up the original game by requiring you to simply have two or more blocks of the same colour touch. The kicker? The blocks now exhibit physical properties and fall accordingly.
• Alex Ruiz has posted a new release of his FEST JavaFX Maven plugin, bumping the version to 1.0 alpha 1. This is a Maven plugin for compiling JavaFX source files.
• Vyacheslav Baranov writes about the availability (or not, depending on which OS your software is running on) of Real-Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) support in JavaFX 1.2.
• Rakesh Menon has posted sample code to illustrate how to upload files using JavaFX.
• Kon at Outrospective.org has posted an overview of the JavaFX 1.2 charting features.

Well, I hope you enjoyed the links, that they were informative, and that I'll see you all again next week :-)