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

• The work on Caciocavallo project that aims to improve OpenJDK graphics stack to enable the use of external implementations of AWT/Java2D backends is continuing even after the official submission date of the OpenJDK Innovators’ Challenge. Roman Kennke has posted a progress update on the project, including two new AWT widgets based on swing, merging back patches from the Cacio branch to main JDK7 and more font refactoring work.
• Jean-Francois Poilpret has taken over the development of DesignGridLayout project that has been in limbo for the last two years. Release 0.9 fixes all known bugs, along with refactoring the code to improve the API, complete Javadocs coverage for the public APIs, and changing the license from GPL to ASL 2.0. It is also available on java.net Maven site.
• Maxim Zakharenkov has presented a session on his SwingExplorer project at this year’s JavaZone conference. The PDF slides are available here. Martosfre Pichincha has a short blog entry on this project.
• Gregg Bolinger shares his thoughts on separating the UI layout logic from the business logic. He cautions against immediate adoption of one of the nascent Swing application frameworks (such as AppFramework, JDAF, Spring RCP and Griffon), instead opining to consider simple Java inheritance, whereas the UI layout logic is placed in the base abstract class which is then extended with a class that implements the business logic.
• Ken Orr continues his work on the Mac Widgets for Java project, providing a Mac-only implementation of Heads Up Display (HUD) consistent with the visuals of HUD windows in many Apple programs.
• Ken Kousen shares his thoughts on Griffon and how it makes the development of UIs simpler, especially for beginner programmers. The Swing example is not the best one, violating the EDT rules, working with the content pane and not centering the frame in the monitor, and the author admits some of these points.
• And on the related note, Geertjan Wielenga interviews the main developers behind Griffon. If you are interested in the past, present and future of Griffon straight from Andres Almiray, James Williams and Danno Ferrin, dive in.

A special section this week is going to cover three projects that should be of interest to Swing developers.

Sage is a platform for running web-enabled desktop applications. It uses a markup language for specifying the UI layout, and allows attaching JavaScript (or Ruby, Python etc) event handlers for the business logic. The CSS-like markup language allows to style not only the UI, but the data as well, providing advanced customization capabilities. Behind the scenes, Sage is using Swing and Java2D to handle the UI control compositing and rendering. The project is developed by Don DeCoteau and is available in 0.9 release.

OfficeLAF project aims to create a high-fidelity implementation of Office 2007 UI and its Black skin as a NetBeans module. It is currently under development with the planned 1.0 release around Christmas. Readers of this blog will notice that the top part of the screenshot below features the JRibbon component from the Flamingo project. The main developers of the project, Gunnar Reinseth and Mikael Tollefsen from Exie AS are reusing some of the work being done in Flamingo, providing a high-fidelity skin and additional UI behavior (such as the main application menu button that is currently under development in Flamingo). Mikael has presented a session on OfficeLAF project at this year’s JavaZone conference, and the PowerPoints slides are available here.

Manuel Kaess has implemented a Vista-style help browser for Swing applications. Noting that the JavaHelp UI is not very easy to use and does not look too attractive, he provides his own help browser implementation that has the usual features that one would expect, including support for search, changing text size and printing. The screenshot below shows his implementation side-by-side with the native Vista help browser.