A somewhat quiet, but interesting week of news this week. Interestingly, Oracle is one step closer to being the new owner of Sun with the US Department of Justice approving the acquisition. That just leaves the European counterpart to consider the acquisition, and they are planning on making a statement on September 3. It may be all over in the next 1.5 weeks.
General
- Don DeCoteau emailed me to let me know that a new release of the Sage Runtime has been made available. Sage is an application rendering engine that renders applications in real-time. Sage applications are described using a markup language, accessed via URLs, and controlled via a scripting language. It appears to work with both Swing and JavaFX (through a FX->Swing wrapper). Licensing is a little unclear - perhaps Don might be so kind to leave a comment regarding this.
Swing
- In perhaps the most controversial blog this week, Alexander Potochkin blogged to say that the Swing Application Framework (SAF) has missed the JDK milestone released it was planned for (note that Java.net is down for maintenance right now, so this link doesn't work right now). This leaves everyone wondering what will become of SAF?
- Jean-Francois Poilpret has been busily working away on his GUTS (Guice Utilities & Tools Set) project. His most recent work has been on GUTS-GUI, which is a Guice-based Swing app framework. You can find the source code in the Kenai SVN repository.
- Ken Orr has a post up detailing some new Java client properties available on Mac platforms. These properties mean that components can get ever-closer to looking like proper Mac apps.
JavaFX
- Sten Anderson has put out a blog detailing what he did to get animated charts (in this case pie charts). Because he was not able to get this working with the JavaFX charting API, he instead built his own pie chart implementation.
- In another post, Sten has done some work on borders and layouts. As noted in the comments, there is some overlap with the borders used in JFXtras, so be sure to look there as well for more borders and layouts.
- Paul Bakker has a blog post detailing his Folder Visualizer project, which enables a person to identify folders on their filesystem that are using a lot of disk space.
- Jim Weaver posts about building applets that are resizable so that they fill the available space inside a browser window.
- Stephen Chin has blogged that the WidgetFX context is heating up. If you are wanting to enter, you better hurry as the competition is closing soon. First prize is a years worth of e-books.
- Carl Dea has posted part three of his JavaFX Forms Framework series.
Well, that's that for another week. Keep churning out the good work, and I'll see you all again in a week :-)
Thoughts on “Java desktop links of the week, August 24”