Java desktop links of the week, March 29

Yeesh, already at the end of March - time is flying! Perhaps most exciting this week is that JavaOne 2010 is now open for registration, and is discounted by $400 if you get in before mid-July. Of course, that isn't the only news - let's get into it!

Swing

• Kirill Grouchnikov has been adding right-to-left support to his Flamingo project, in particular in command buttons and rich tooltips.
• Eugene Ryzhikov has posted part four of his Swinging Task Dialogs blog series. This week he has announced the release of 0.5.0 of the library, which is dedicated to Mac OS support.
• Gerrit Grunwald has posted two very interesting posts this week. Firstly, he talks about adding weather information to the world clock he has written previously, and creating a departure board in Swing / Java2D.

JavaFX

• A lot has been said this week about whether or not JavaFX is ready for the prime time. Coming out to give his perspective on the issue is Adam Bien, who lists 11 reasons why he thinks JavaFX is on the right path.
• Tor Norbye has blogged about transparent windows in Linux, based on his experience in building the upcoming Authoring Tool and testing it across platforms.
• Johan Vos has blogged about map rendering in JavaFX using data from OpenStreetMap. He provides both a runnable demo, and also the code. What's most fascinating is how little code was actually written to support this - it really is a tiny amount.
• Rakesh Menon created a Wizard UI in JavaFX which is actually quite nice, and certainly usable for people wanting to show wizards in JavaFX.
• Exadel have released version 1.2.3 of the JavaFX Plugin for Eclipse. They have also announced that they plan to release more regular, and smaller, updates for the plugin (once every two weeks or so).
• Nathan Erwin emailed me about a Maven Javafxdoc plugin that he has been working on. This allows for you to easily generate JavaFX API documentation as part of the Maven build process.
• Peter Pilgrim has posted a new demo of his Moonlander game, which along with providing a new stage also fixes a few bugs.
• Joshua Smith has blogged about static fields and functions in JavaFX. This is one of those areas that differs from how it is done in Java, but it's certainly still possible in JavaFX to have static fields and functions.
• If you're wanting to learn more about JavaFX then Sang Shin has a slide deck titled "JavaFX: Building RIA Application" you should check out. Unfortunately, the 'Application' part of the title is a little redundant given the RIA acronym preceding it, but it's a very easy trap to fall in to.

After writing all these links out I realise - there is a heap of interesting news and blog posts this week, so get clicking :-) That's it for another week - catch you all in a weeks time!