Features

Wicket + Swing == hmmm...interesting...

My grade-school friend Jonathan Locke, who is the creator of Wicket sent me a fascinating brainstorm the other day. Particularly in light of all of the hoo-hah around AJAX these days, I asked him for the OK to blog it. Here's what he had to say...  —  Tim Boudreau
  (2006-02-01T20:05-08:00)

Swing Sightings Preview: XPontus XML Editor

According to dictionary.com, in 400 BC Pontus was a country along the southern coast of the Black Sea. According to XPontus developer Yves Zoundi it's a free XML editor, written in Java, that's "designed towards text editing." It's intended to be a free alternative to commercial XML editors, and it's available wherever Java is. It's been tested on Linux, Windows and FreeBSD. Check out the screenshots.
  (Feb 01, 2006)

Get GetJava

Help spread the word, and get this nifty logo on your site for FREE!  —  Chet Haase
  (2006-01-31T07:32-08:00)

Announcing the Mustang regressions challenge

We are challenging you, the Java developer community, to find functional regressions between J2SE 5.0 (Tiger) and Java SE 6 (Mustang). The contest runs from Jan 31 through March 31, 2006, with prizes to be awarded in mid-April. You will find details on the contest home page and FAQ. The complete entry requirements are in the official legal rules governing the contest. You can enter the contest using the contest entry form.  —  David Herron
  (2006-01-30T23:03-08:00)

JavaDesktop Forums Planned Downtime
The Javadesktop forums will be down starting at 9:00 AM (PST) January 31, 2006 as we move the forums from javadesktop.org to java.net. We hope to make this transition by the end of the day and have the forums back up by the evening. If you have any questions or concerns, please send an email to community_leader AT javadesktop DOT org.
  (Jan 31, 2006)

Mustang Regressions Challenge

The J2SE development staff and the JDK Community have announced the Mustang Regression Contest. For introductory information see David Herron's blog. For a full description of the contest go to the Mustang Regressions Challenge home page.
  (Jan 30, 2006)

Architecting Applications 2: the Application class

This is the second blog in a series on architecting applications. In the first blog I discussed the application I'm going to develop, how it would be architected, and briefly went over the model. In this second article I'll motivate the need for an Application class that is suitable for typical Swing based Apps, as well as the functionality it should provide.  —  Scott Violet
  (2006-01-30T15:03-08:00)

Invitation to weigh in on the future of javadoc

If you've ever found yourself cursing in silence or otherwise because you can't find the answer to a J2SE programming question in the javadoc, then we have a survey for you...  —  Amy Fowler
  (2006-01-27T14:48-08:00)

Sun Announces Matisse Endorsements, Broad Developer Adoption

Sun just sent out this press release, which touts "Project Matisse — the Graphical User Interface Builder and one of the most innovative features of the highly anticipated NetBeans 5.0 Integrated development Environment (IDE) software" as "a major advancement in the creation of rich client Java applications." It features this endorsement from Serpro, Brazil's largest public IT company: "NetBeans solves the problem that has been plaguing developers for years — easy GUI creation. There is nothing else like it in the market today and our Java desktop developers are now switching to NetBeans."
  (Jan 27, 2006)

What's the Next Big Thing in Java?

In Yakov Fain's latest blog entry, he issues a challenge for the Java desktop: "IMHO, Java need a major breakthrough in the front end (GUI) area... What's your take on this? Do you see the next big thing in Java?"
  (Jan 26, 2006)

Where We Are With the JDK
Thanks to the efforts of many people across the industry, Mustang (Java SE 6) is moving forward and is looking to be a very exciting release. Beta is scheduled for public availability within the next few weeks and Sun will open up the Dolphin project (Java SE 7) on java.net for contributions and feedback in a few months.  —  Ray Gans

Fulfilling Dreams and Shattering Dreams: All in one day

At the top of Today's To Do List: 1) send out notifications for accepted, alternate and declined JavaOne technical sessions...  —  Annette Vernon
  (2006-01-23T16:39-08:00)

A useful testing technique to find deadlocks related to invokeAndWait

This blog entry talks about one by Tom Hawtin that discusses a deadlock he found in jedit 4.2. Hawtin provides a class to help you automatically find such deadlocks. —  David Herron
  (2006-01-19T20:51-08:00)

Swing Depot Addition: Ephox

We've just added Ephox to the Swing Depot's Component Suites page. They offer the EditLive! JavaBean, a robust, Word-like, HTML authoring component that can be instantly added to Swing applications. Don't miss the web started demo!
  (Jan 20, 2006)

Enable Dropping into Empty JTables

Shannon Hickey shows how to enable dropping into empty JTables with a single method call in Mustang, or a simple override in earlier versions of J2SE.  —  Shannon Hickey
  (2006-01-19T13:46-08:00)

Architecting Applications 1: the model

In the first of a series of blogs on creating a Swing app I motivate the app, the architecture the app will use, and quickly touch on the model. In addition I'll show how easy it is to use beans persistence as a way to save and restore beans.  —  Scott Violet
  (2006-01-18T16:33-08:00)

Project Looking Glass in future OpenSolaris

Project Looking Glass, which uses modern GPU power to enhance the desktop experience, is nearing a major public debut. OpenSolaris has announced that the Project Looking Glass platform and sample desktop will be included in OpenSolaris, with a target release of November 2006.
  (Jan 18, 2006)

Swing Sightings Preview: dbSketch 1.0

The folks at coderCentric describe dbSketch as "the database design and modeling tool specifically designed for application developers — not DBAs, analysts, or theorists." dbSketch lets you design your schema quickly and easily, using IDEF1x notation, and export it to a SQL script instantly. You can even jump-start your design by importing an existing SQL DDL. It supports Oracle 9 and 10, MySQL 4 and 5, and Postgres 8. The app is 100% Java/Swing and completely cross-platform for Mac and Windows. Check out the screenshots.
  (Jan 18, 2006)

Location-Sensitive Drag and Drop in Mustang

Prompted by a question on his recent Swing Drag and Drop blog entry, Shannon Hickey talks about location-sensitive Drag and Drop in Mustang.  —  Shannon Hickey
  (2006-01-17T12:19-08:00)

Swing Sightings Preview: Sun Sim Datacenter

The Sim Datacenter is a big web started app from Sun Microsystems. According to Sun marketing: Sim Datacenter lets you simulate your datacenter to see how Sun's new CoolThreads servers can save you power, cooling, and space. Inspired by the "The Sims" games, this interactive tool will challenge you to build a high-performing datacenter. To run it with Java Web Start, go to this page and click the Launch It button. Here are some screenshots: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
  (Jan 17, 2006)

toto, The Francophone foo

Where Shannon Hickey learns about metasyntactic variables in other languages, during a recent trip to Montreal, Canada.  —  Shannon Hickey
  (2006-01-16T08:22-08:00)

New JavaDesktop Feature: Community Announcements

You may have noticed a new feature in the right column of this page: Community Announcements. It's automatically updated every time a JavaDesktop project has a new announcement. When you make your first announcement, please send e-mail to editor AT javadesktop DOT org so we can get your RSS feed set up. And don't forget to put your project's name in the headline!
  (Jan 13, 2006)

400 Horsepower: Image I/O Improvements in Mustang

Image I/O performance enhancements in Mustang... (In)action shots of the Java Client team... And my first external Mustang fix submission...  —  Chris Campbell
  (2006-01-13T01:04-08:00)

Debugging Swing, the summary #1

Why automatic dispatching Swing methods to Event Dispatch Thread is not so good?  —  Alexander Potochkin
  (2006-01-12T09:38-08:00)

Swing Sightings Preview: kbforge

Kbforge is a new, free desktop search application specifically designed for software developers, and it's available for Linux and Windows. Developer Victor Negrin says what differentiates kbforge from other desktop search programs is its ability to assist the user in categorising the information before it is indexed. kbforge uses JDIC for web browsing, previewing search results, and its quick launch tray. It uses Lucene for indexing and searching and as the default database manager. A companion product, kbforge.plus, provides a wide choice of database managers and additional features. Check out the screenshots: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
  (Jan 12, 2006)

SwingWorker: Throttling and monitoring?

Antonio Vieiro's blog has an interesting entry on using background threads without spawning too many. Be sure to check out the comments, which clarify details such as SwingWorkers sharing a 10-thread pool.
  (Jan 10, 2006)

A JMX MBean to visualize AWT events

Jean-Francois Denise recently developed an MBean that can be dropped in any Java application, and which exports AWT events in the JMX world.
  (Jan 10, 2006)

Using Java Web Start to Launch NetBeans

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to show a Java source file in NetBeans by clicking on a JNLP link in the browser? Now you can.  —  Hans Muller
  (2006-01-09T16:21-08:00)

SDN Article: The New Modality API in Mustang

Mustang introduces new dialog modality choices that let you specify whether a modal dialog blocks just one document, its application, or the entire toolkit. This article describes the new modality features and features an example (with code, of course) of using them.
  (Jan 06, 2006)

Video Presentation: Desktop Java in Action

If you speak french, you can download a video of Desktop Java in Action. Otherwise, get the slides.  —  Romain Guy
  (2006-01-04T23:25-08:00)

NetBeans with anti aliasing

I said it several times: I use Eclipse. But yet another reason for me to use Eclipse instead of NetBeans is now gone.  —  Romain Guy
  (2006-01-02T15:42-08:00)

First Class Drag and Drop Support in Mustang

Shannon Hickey introduces major enhancements to Swing Drag and Drop in Mustang, and also recounts his recent once-in-a-lifetime visit to Saint Petersburg, Russia, with pictures from the trip.  —  Shannon Hickey
  (2006-01-02T15:41-08:00)

Two new flash demos and NetBeans Module update

The community is awesome to provide feedback about quality and features. The coments left to the previous blog, made me improve the NetBeans Module Startup Settings I am developing, see the screenshot. I created two flash demos to show how to add custom swing widgets to the palette manager, the other flash demo shows how to use GridbagLayout and Freedesign (aka: Matisse) each one with different JPanels, but inside one JPanel (or JFrame).  —  Claudio Miranda
  (2005-12-29T22:57-08:00)

Swinging Java IDEs

After IntelliJ and NetBeans have been decorated with pictures of scantily clad women and rhino-shaped "Apply" buttons, it's JDeveloper's turn.  —  Kirill Grouchnikov
  (2005-12-29T11:05-08:00)

JAI 1.1.3-beta Webstart binaries now available

The Java Advanced Imaging 1.1.3-beta is now available for immediate download on java.net. Please go to the JAI project home page at https://jai.dev.java.net and click on the Downloads link. The changes in JAI 1.1.3-beta with respect to JAI 1.1.3-alpha are listed in the JAI 1.1.3-beta README file on the binary builds page.
  (Dec 23, 2005)

NetBeans Look and Feel Competition

Have you customised your NetBeans IDE look & feel? Are you using a non-standard look & feel, or are you using the Substance plug-in to change NetBeans' look? Have you tweaked the L&F; in some other way? If so, share your customisation and you could win one of three iPod Nanos, 10 USB flash memory sticks or 30 NetBeans T-Shirts! Competition details are here.
  (Dec 23, 2005)

Spicing up your JTabbedPane - part II

The second part of the series that describes the additional capabilities that you can get on your tabbed panes. This entry describes vetoable close buttons and vertical tabs.  —  Kirill Grouchnikov
  (2005-12-22T12:49-08:00)

Automated visual verification is hard

With the flat 2D still-life style components we have today it's hard to automate visual verification. What are we going to do when GUI's are dancing and singing away? How will we be able to automatically verify it's dancing the right way and not stumbling around? —  David Herron
  (2005-12-21T16:47-08:00)

Mustang Release Contents (JSR 270): Early Draft Review

Just in time for the holidays, the Early Draft Review version of the JSR 270 specification is now available.  —  Mark Reinhold
  (2005-12-21T12:08-08:00)

JavaLobby: 2005 "renaissance in desktop Java"

JavaLobby's Rick Ross said some nice things about desktop Java in his Obligatory "Year In Review" Column: Performance gains and enhancements in key Java libraries have led to a virtual renaissance in desktop Java. Examples of what you can achieve with Swing (such as those at Romain Guy's blog) prove that Java is actually quite well suited for building up-to-date desktop applications. By the way, you can see Romain's blog entries here and here.
  (Dec 21, 2005)

JPasswordField with an empty echo character: the fix

Learn why my last attempt at a password field with an empty space echo character failed and how to fix it. And of course a demo is thrown in for good measure.  —  Scott Violet
  (2005-12-19T15:38-08:00)

3D Java Strategy Game Reaches the Winner's Circle Realtime strategy game Tribal Trouble from OddLabs.com was ranked number two in the just announced "Game of the Year" results from GameTunnel.com. Tribal Trouble gained the honor for being fun, entertaining, and easy to play. We're sure that the fact that the game is pure Java had a hand in the victory too. Check out the screenshots here. Vikings!

JRockit 5.0 on desktop - show me the money

After numerous press releases showing that BEA's JRockit is the fastest JVM around, I have decided to try it out for a desktop application. The result - it may be the fastest for the application servers, but it most certainly is not the best for the desktop.  —  Kirill Grouchnikov
  (2005-12-13T08:24-08:00)

Substance 2.1 official release

Packed with a lot of new features (and a lot of bug fixes), Substance look-and-feel has reached the official release 2.1  —  Kirill Grouchnikov
  (2005-12-12T11:40-08:00)

JavaOne Excitement Is In the Air

It isn't holiday excitement that I am experiencing right now, but the thrill of having nearly 1400 papers to review for the 2006 JavaOne Conference.  —  Annette Vernon
  (2005-12-07T16:37-08:00)

Swing Depot Update: InfoNode

We've just updated the screenshots in the InfoNode section of the Swing Depot's Component Suites page. The new pictures show the just-released version 1.4.0 of NNL Technology's InfoNode products.
  (Dec 08, 2005)

JFreeChart 1.0.0 Released

A new version of JFreeChart, the very popular free charting library for the Java platform, is now available for download from http://www.jfree.org/jfreechart/. You can run the JFreeChart Demo (no certificate required!) via Java Web Start. Don't miss the oddly hypnotic PieChart3DDemo2 (under Pie Charts); another interesting one is the DifferenceChartDemo2 (under Miscellaneous).
  (Dec 07, 2005)

The Next Wave of GUIs: Project Matisse and NetBeans IDE 5.0

Project Matisse creators Scott Violet and Tomas Pavek discuss how the NetBeans IDE 5.0 simplifies development of GUIs and results in a cross-platform visual designer.
  (Dec 07, 2005)

Swing Sightings Preview: JSwat 3.0

JSwat is a graphical Java debugger front-end that uses the Java Platform Debugger Architecture and is based on the NetBeans Platform. JSwat is open-source software, freely available in both binary and source code form. Its features include breakpoints with conditionals; colorized source code display with code navigator; movable display panels showing threads, call stack, visible variables, and loaded classes; command interface for more advanced features; and Java-like expression evaluation, including method invocation. Check out this screenshot.
  (Dec 06, 2005)

Swing Pointers List Updated

Charles Ditzel has produced a new, improved version of Swing Pointers, his very handy page of links for developers using the Java SE platform to develop GUIs. He promises to keep it up-to-date and welcomes your e-mailed suggestions.
  (Dec 06, 2005)

Variations of JPasswordField

Learn how to create alternate views of JPasswordField. In the proess I'll cover portions of Swing's text architecture.  —  Scott Violet
  (2005-12-05T15:37-08:00)

NetBeans Performance Profiler - Now for the Mac!

Tor Norbye blogged Thursday that milestone 11 of the NetBeans Performance Profiler has a big new feature: support for Mac OS X! If you're a Mac user, please try out this feature and give them feedback.
  (Dec 05, 2005)

JavaPolis 2005

JavaPolis 2005 is taking place next week. If you want to meet two new members of the Swing Team and see some cool stuff, come to Antwerp.  —  Romain Guy
  (2005-12-05T02:49-08:00)

Swing Sightings Preview: RageWork

RageWork 2.4 is a cross-platform file manager designed to manage your files, documents, and resources, and to do a lot of cool things. The key features of this release are fast sub-folder access, quick searching, a filter view, the ability to split and merge files, WWW editor validators, auto file completion, auto-change encoding in text-based files, bookmarks for network clients, the ability to resume file transfers in FTP, auto-recognition of encoding in FTP, tooltips for folder description, and improvements to status, error messages, virtual folders, the UI, and performance. You can try it out using Java Web Start. Or just check out the screenshots: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
  (Dec 02, 2005)

Featured Project: Scenic

The Scenic project, newly graduated from the JavaDesktop incubator, provides a scene-based 2D graphics library for the Java platform. (In a previous incarnation, Scenic was a C++ library that ran only on Linux.) The Scenic project owner would like users and testers; contributions are also welcome. See the Scenic project home for details.
  (Dec 01, 2005)

Proposal for uniform support of third-party components in custom look-and-feels

This posting proposes an approach for uniform support of third-party components in custom look-and-feels. The approach has been successfully adopted in Liquid and Substance look-and-feels.  —  Kirill Grouchnikov
  (2005-11-28T13:21-08:00)

Facade, gaming redefined

Every now and then, a group of few people come up with a bright idea that shakes the world of video games. Façade might just be one of them and it's Java powered.  —  Romain Guy
  (2005-11-28T20:07-08:00)

Jake2 on Slashdot

Jake2, bytonic's Java 3D port of Quake2, has been featured in the Slashdot post Quake2 Ported to Java, Play Via the Web. [We previewed a Swing Sighting of Jake2 here last May; the full writeup is in Swing Sightings #22.] There's been lots of interesting feedback to the Slashdot post. Here's one quote: "Runs great on my 1.2 GHz G4 with 640 MB of RAM in OS X 10.4.3. ... This is the coolest use of Java I've ever seen."
  (Nov 28, 2005)

Deliver Your Java Application in One-JAR!

[This blog entry from last week has had some interesting responses.] Packing a simple application I discovered I can't include the driver of the MySql into the JAR of my application. This is a feature of the JAR tool that force the users to download several files or to use an external unzip tool in order to unzip the files before running the aplication - very odd. —  Felipe Gaucho
  (2005-11-23T11:10-08:00)

Debugging Swing - is it really difficult ?

Do we need to invent something to make it easier, or it is not a problem at all ?  —  Alexander Potochkin
  (2005-11-23T01:57-08:00)

Help Wanted: Intern to Spread the Word

If you're a student with a knack for creating Web content, do we have an internship for you!  —  Kathy Walrath
  (2005-11-22T16:41-08:00)

Why the JEditorPane is important to the JavaHelp ContentViewer

With planning for the next realease of the JDK underway, swing development teams are looking at some promising changes that will impact the JavaHelp implementation. This blog looks at why the JEditorPane and the associated changes are important and why your vote as a JavaHelp user is important.  —  Roger Brinkley
  (2005-11-22T13:06-08:00)

The Fast Way to $5000

eBay just lauched a developer challenge. Use NetBeans to get your unfair advantage.  —  Brian Leonard
  (2005-11-18T18:14-08:00)

Changes to Actions in 1.6

Read up on the changes to Actions in 1.6.  —  Scott Violet
  (2005-11-21T08:16-08:00)

Hardware Acceleration in Mustang

A recent thread on the Mustang Snapshots: Project Feedback forum has discussed graphics acceleration — the OpenGL pipeline, DirectX, and so on. Here's a nice quote (and no, we didn't pay linuxhippy to say this): In my eyes Java2d is one of the most powerful, fast and most stable rendering engines around - no commercial engine I know can provide this feature-richness nor performance.
  (Nov 18, 2005)