Java desktop links of the week, June 13

Another week, another batch of links. Let's just get right into it!

JavaFX

• GroovyFX was announced this week by Jim Clarke, which is a library that makes building JavaFX 2.0 user interfaces easier (when written in Groovy, obviously). The features include a SceneGraphBuilder, TimelineBuilder, bind syntax and a GroovyDSL to support colors, durations, timelines, enumerations, etc. I'm very excited to see alternate JVM languages starting to adopt JavaFX 2.0 now that it is all Java-based.
• Speaking of alternate JVM languages, here are two blog posts by Emil Kruczek about using JavaFX 2.0 in Clojure.
• Tom Schindl has taken JavaFX 2.0 for a spin, and thinks that JavaFX 2.0 is looking pretty good, which is kind considering he is an SWT fan. Despite this, he says that "[t]his makes me a bit sorry about SWT because compared to what JavaFX provides to me SWT is light years behind."
• In a separate post, Tom blogs about using Xtext to create a JavaFX-CSS editor, which, he theorises, could quite nicely become part of an Eclipse JavaFX 2.0 plugin (along with other Eclipse-based techonologies).
• Rafa? Rusin has blogged about visualising GIS data in JavaFX 2.0 beta using GeoTools.
• I put up a link to my in-progress JavaFX Control Cell Factories project. Currently you can just check out the (clearly beta quality) screenshots and see what the API looks like (hint: fully static API with a lot of Callbacks - I can't wait for closures to clean this up!).

Swing

• Gerrit Grunwald has blogged about scaling shapes in Java2D.
• JIDE Software released version 3.0.4 of their libraries, which includes a number of enhancements and bug fixes.

SWT

• Laurent Caron has made available further features  in his Opal widgets project. The latest release includes a horizontal Spinner, two "panels" in order to blur a form or make it darker, and a checkBoxGroup whose contents are activated by ticking a checkbox.

That's all for another week. I hope you all found something useful in the links above. Catch you again in a weeks time, and keep up all the hard work folks!