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

• Dave Gilbert of JFreeChart project follows in the footsteps of Google Chart and provides a servlet that generates embeddable chart images for web applications. While not strictly relevant to Swing, it employs the same approach as outlined by Jacobus Steenkamp in this article from java.net – using Swing as backend to generate images to be displayed in web pages.
• Ramon Ramos has announced a NetBeans plugin that installs the Synthetica look and feel with matching delegates for custom NetBeans components (editor tabs, viewer tabs and sliding buttons). The plugin itself can be downloaded here, and while the sources are not publicly available, it appears that it uses internal Synthetica APIs to paint the relevant component visuals. Before using this module in your NetBeans RCP applications, make sure that you comply with the licensing terms of Synthetica itself – while the declared license of the plugin is “Netbeans”, some Synthetica skins can not be used without a commercial license. This marks the third look-and-feel plugin for NetBeans after Substance and Napkin.
• JIDE Software has announced the second major update to JIDE Desktop Application Framework (JDAF). I would really like to see David and his team to have regular updates to the company blog, showcasing their excellent products
• Eric Burke writes on a more compact way to fire property change events on Swing components. I jumped the gun a little too early in the comments, and his implementation is correct. The compactness sacrifices the readability a little, and i think that i still would prefer the usual way.
• Sun started (a potentially long) wave of announcements leading to the Update N and JavaFX this week at JavaPolis with the Scene Graph project. Geertjan has a small example over at this Javalobby thread, but i am much more interested to see how this will be supported in the JavaFX designer tool chain. Obviously, the designer must support visual editing and creating the JavaFX code / matching scene graph in the underlying code. But will it be able to go the other way around – be able to parse a Java class with scene graph definition and show the resulting scene at design time? Or even better, will it be able to parse an arbitrary scene graph definition, or still have the same “guarded” blocks in NetBeans?
• The second announcement from Sun is about the all-Java PDF renderer project. It’s quite illuminating to read the comments on the original announcement and this Javalobby thread. The most interesting part of the project page reads: “The PDF Renderer currently supports a subset 1.4 of the PDF specification. It does not support transparency, various font encodings or fill-in forms. These are the first features we hope the community will tackle“. Applying the usual rules of “it takes 90% of the time to get the first 90% of the features, and then the rest 90% of the time to get the rest 10% of the features”, these are obviously not the easiest parts of the spec (which is not even the latest spec). Will it follow in the footsteps of Flying Saucer, providing support for only a subset of the (quite big) spec? Will it follow in the footsteps of SwingX, with the community finally stepping in after more than two years since the project inception? Hopefully, this will not result in the same fallout as the announcement of SwingX painters, the bitter reaction of WingZ developers and the eventual closing of ZValley company.

Flamingo component suite comes with a flexible and powerful component that hosts command buttons, providing support for button groups, single selection mode (for toggle command buttons), same icon state / dimension and automatic column layout. The official documentation for the base command button panel and file viewer panel have the detailed walkthroughs, and here i will give a short overview of some of the main features.

As noted earlier, one of Flamingo’s goals is to provide a small and cohesive set of powerful UI components that allow creating modern applications that provide visual functionality similar to or superseding that of Vista Explorer and Office 2007. The command button panel and its extension, file viewer panel, address the functionality commonly found in file explorer applications.

Here is a simple file explorer that uses the breadcrumb bar and file viewer panel with button state set to medium:

Here, the icon for image files come from the file itself (thumbnails), while the icons for other mimetypes are taken from the latest SVN snapshot of the KDE Oxygen project.

Here is the same exact application with big icons:

The icons are properly scaled and the inner layout of the buttons changed to reflect the new button state. What about custom large icons?

The same functionality, only controlled by the flexible slider (on the left hand side of the application frame). Note that the bottom-right button has the icon based on the actual JPG contents (scaled down), while the other three buttons sport resolution-independent sharp visuals from Oxygen SVG images.

Here is the same application under the tiled state – with extra line of information on each file:

The last screenshot is from a sample SVN browser that uses the same icon computation approach, tiled state and extra line of information on each file (fetched from the SVN repository and set on the corresponding command button):

You’re welcome to play with the latest 3.0dev drop of Flamingo and read the detailed documentation on command button panel and file viewer panel.

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

• Jasper Potts posted an update on the Nimbus development progress. The screenshot shows the support for the different component sizes (using the same client properties as the latest Aqua drop). As the comments point out, there are quite a few visual inconsistencies which will be hopefully addressed (small and mini scroll bars, inconsistent scaling of arrow icons across different controls, small and mini indeterminate progress bars and text field shadows are among these).
• The latest drop of Dolphin addresses bug 6438179, providing correct implementation of tray service availability on Unix platforms. Backport to Update N highly desired.
• Danno Ferrin kicks off the slew of Groovy-related items with his overview of new Swing features in Groovy 1.5.
• Andres Almiray is back with a few postings of his own. Starting with CSS support in Swing / Groovy applications, he provides a little more information (and a screenshot) on GraphicsPad, and finishes off with updates on builders for WingS and Jide.
• Geertjan Wielenga blogs about integrating a YouTube player inside NetBeans IDE. A sad tribute to the lack of open-source video playback components in Java (he is using the commercial WebRenderer library). This is still on top of my wishlist for 2008, and is still foolish to hope for.

If you ever needed an argument against using a visual UI designer that enforces any logic on the code it creates, here it is:

In JBuilder 2007 CodeGear/Borland has completely dropped GUI editing support for the jbinit() stuff. So anyone who needs to update their old code need to rewrite it from scratch (which is a major risk) or handcraft it.

By show of hands – who would have thought in 1997 2000 (when JBuilder pretty much ruled the Java IDE landscape) that this could happen? Are you sure that NetBeans will outlive all the code that is being created by it as we speak? And by the way, the only complete visual UI editor that doesn’t impose any logic on the code it edits and is able to parse out even the most complicated custom forms that i have thrown at it comes from Instantiations. Now if only they could reduce the memory footprint from 400MB to something a little bit more realistic…