Java desktop links of the week, March 12

<warm-welcome />

JavaFX

• Build 16 of JavaFX 2.1 Developer Preview is now out. Go get it and give it a good test!
• Jasper Potts converted the animate.css project to JavaFX, providing 52 ready to use animations for you to use in your applications.
• Michael Heinrichs has blogged about how to create a sprite animation with JavaFX. The way in which he does it is quite interesting, and well worth reading to understand this area of the JavaFX API.
• Steve Northover has updated the instructions for building OpenJFX.
• Angela Caicedo has put up part two of her 'building your first JavaFX application using NetBeans 7.1' YouTube video.
• The Pro JavaFX 2 book was released this week. I read the first edition and it covered everything I needed to know before joining the JavaFX team, so it is well recommended.
• Johan Vos has blogged about the availability of RedFX for JavaFX 2, and has a sample application showing how to use it.
• Tom Schindl has announced that the next release of e(fx)clipse will contain improved OSGi support. This makes it easier to use JavaFX within Eclipse views.
• Jeff Friesen has written a three-part series about 'Practical JavaFX 2', where he goes about porting a Swing application to JavaFX.
• Narayan Maharjan, after being prompted in a forum thread, has blogged about how to go about skinning the JavaFX Tooltip control.
• Andy Moncsek has blogged about how to use his open source JacpFX framework.
• Christian Schudt has blogged about his improvements to the JavaFX TreeView control to allow for populating it using just a List of items, rather than having to create TreeItem instances. This is something I'll likely add to the DataFX project in the coming weeks as it seems like a useful thing to have.
• Brian Schlining has created a ScalaFX version of the GroovyFX demo application.

Swing

• Gerrit Grunwald has released an updated version of his SteelSeries Swing library, taking the version number up to 3.9.23. This release includes improvements to the LCD component.
• Christoph Aschwanden let me know about his Java-based game 'Operation Stormfront'. He said the following: "Tropical Stormfront is a real-time strategy game for PC, Mac & Linux. The game is played on tropical archipelagos. Tropical Stormfront is written in Java (JRE 6) and runs in a JFrame. The interface/graphics are rendered in OpenGL, so I am not sure if it qualifies for your desktop links as it doesn't really contain any Swing/JavaFX components besides the JFrame it is running :-) " It's Java, and it is on the desktop - so that is good enough for me Christoph! :-)

<best-wishes />