Java desktop links of the week, April 12

A huge number of really good links this week in both the Swing and JavaFX worlds. Keep up the good work folks - it's great to see what you're all churning out :-)

Swing

• Kirill Grouchnikov continues to improve the Flamingo components, this week adding support for vertical scrolling of long popup menus.
• A seemingly popular effect being used these days is the page-turn effect. I've seen a tonne of tutorials on it, but this week found one that uses Java2D, Trident and JXLayer to achieve this effect. There is another excellent tutorial on this effect, but just ignore the RIA technology being used ;-).
• David Gilbert let me know about a JRuby project making use of his JFreeChat library. I've never used JRuby, but in general it's nice to see that the JVM facilitates the usage of libraries written in different languages to the actual applications language.

JavaFX

• Just a reminder: Stuart Marks is presenting at the Silicon Valley JavaFX Users Group on April 14 at the Oracle headquarters in Redwood Shores. Remember, you can also watch the presentation live online, time zones permitting :-) For those that don't know Stuart, he is a member of the JavaFX Controls team with me, and he's been at Sun nearly as long as I've been alive (give or take one year) :-)
• Rakesh Menon has created a modal dialog in JavaFX, and it actually works very nicely (with the constraints present in JavaFX 1.2). Check it out if you need a modal dialog for your application.
• Stephen Chin has announced the release of JFXtras 0.6, which is a long time in the making and as such has a heap of new stuff. Check out Stephen's post to find out more details. Somewhat embarrassingly my menu control turns up in there. Apologies in advance to anyone using that set of controls :-) As noted elsewhere, improved menu controls turn up as previews in JavaFX 1.3.
• Speaking of new JavaFX controls, I stumbled upon the MindFusion UI Pack for JavaFX this week which is a commercial controls pack for JavaFX. My only comment: be weary as to whether this'll work in JavaFX 1.3 before splashing out some cold hard cash for it.
• Eric J Bruno has published an article on Dr Dobbs titled 'JavaFX Database Programming with Java DB'.
• A new release of the JavaFX Plugin for Eclipse has been released, taking it up to version 1.2.4.

As always, email or tweet me if you want to suggest a link or chat. That's us for another week - catch you all again next week!