Java desktop links of the week, January 17

Well, after skipping last weeks post due to lack of news, this week is looking a little better, but things are still quiet on the Java desktop front. As always, I appreciate any email pointers you may have for me - my contact details are always to the right. Let's get into the links of the past two weeks :-)

Swing

• Jean-Francois Poilpret has put out the 1.7 release of his DesignGridLayout Swing LayoutManager. This release allows layouts to be more dynamic by giving the ability to hide or show entire rows. This makes it very easy to implement panels with collapsible/expandable zones.
• Gerrit Grunwald has continued work on the Steel series of gauges, with a lot of code cleanups and API improvements. In his latest blog post he has announced that the library will be available in Maven.

Miscellaneous

• Stephen Chin has put up another blog post about the Visage project, showing off how he used Visage (which resembles JavaFX Script) to create a simple Android application.
• Laurent Caron let me know about his Opal project, which is a umbrella project for a number of SWT components.
• Alex Ruiz, author of the FEST testing library and a recent member of the JavaFX controls team, has announced that he has decided to leave Oracle to join Google. Before joining the JavaFX controls team (with me), he worked in other areas of Oracle for around four years. It's a shame to see him leave our team, but I want to wish him all the best at his new job.
• James Sugrue picked up on a tweet by Kirill Grouchnikov, asking what has happened to the Java App Store that was promoted around JavaOne 2009.

That's all folks - I warned you it has been quiet. I'll catch you again in a weeks time...