Here are some Swing links that you might have missed during this week:

• Thierry Lefort published an update to the lazy loading tree. It now includes a single expansion listener and better model / controller separation.
• Alex Ruiz will present a JavaOne session with Yvonne Price. It will talk about GUI testing and their FEST library.
• Jeff Friesen has an overview article about the AnimatingCardLayout project that provides animations on top of a usual core card layout. I have already blogged about the various approaches to the layout animation, and the last year hasn’t changed my opinion. These are nice to have, but almost never used. An important note on the specific project – it has been inactive since December 2004, so if you find a bug or want to file an enhancement, you’re on your own (the project license is BSD).
• Christopher Deckers announces release 0.9.4 of DJ Native Swing library. This brings improvement to stability and two new components, JVLCPlayer and JHTMLEditor.
• Christophe Le Besnerais writes about his experiments in colorizing Swing UIs. The code has an interesting twistin that it allows colorizing only some parts of the interface.
• Pavan Kumar explores a technique of showing progress without blocking the entire UI. Building on the previous work by Alexander Potochkin, it is a nice idea, but i found that the test application is not working as expected. While the table is indeed not blocked by the tree and shows that a selected cell is editable, i couldn’t type anything in until the tree was unblocked.
• Dave Cherry is working on wrapping the JFreeChart library in a Groovy builder. The code is being developed on top of the GroovyChart library.
• Andres Almiray has a busy Groovy week. He announced release 0.5 of his GraphicsBuilder library and also published the fourth part of the Groovy Zone tutorial.

Finally, quote of the week belongs to James Gosling:

Even though it’s a Java game, it’s only available for Windows and OS X – they use QuickTime for Java. (we’re trying to get our cross-platform media story together, but it’s tough… [codecs are easy, we’ve got piles of them: it’s all about patent royalties on free software :-( ])

Let’s compare this with QT Jambi:

Qt and Qt Jambi 4.4 gets full-blown multimedia support through the Phonon framework adopted from KDE. This gives easy access to playing and manipulating movies and music in all the nice file formats for which the underlying media framework has codecs. The framework defaults to using Gstreamer (Linux), Microsoft DirectShow (Windows) and Quicktime (Mac OS X).

So, another cross-platform UI toolkit is showing that it can be done and that it will be officially released this year…