Making Swing apps rock

We've pointed to Scott Delap's posts from time to time on his site Client Java. He has recently completed a book for SourceBeat called Java Desktop Live and we are presenting a pdf excerpt of Chapter 5: Swing Threading.

Speaking of making Swing perform better, Scott Violet blogs on some improvements coming in Mustang in today's Weblogs . In Swing Painting Improvements: No More Gray Rect! he reports "In scoping out various performance related projects for mustang we wanted to tackle one of Swing's long standing problem areas that has contributed to bad perceived performance. That is, when a Swing based app is exposed after being hidden by another application there is a noticeable delay between when the background of the window is erased and when the actual contents are painted. We've come to call this the 'gray rect' problem. I'm happy to report that with the promotion of mustang build 32 this bug (4967886) has been fixed!"

Kohsuke Kawaguchi blogs that Finally JAXB RI CVS repository is on java.net! " [A]ll the code that constitutes the JAXB RI --- the runtime, the compiler, the schema generator, and the whole thing --- are on java.net. And it's not a mirror, it's not a snapshot, but it is live! every change we make daily goes directly to this repository."

Where are all those geeky jokes in Groovy? Tom White blogs groovy -pi -e. Is it time to bring those Perl one liners to the Java platform?

Michael Nielson posts on new vocabularies for new problems. " Increasingly, I feel like being a good, responsible Java developer no longer means merely being able to write solid code in Java, but rather increasingly it means knowing when *not* to program in Java. And that's a lot more work."

In Also in Java Today , JMX is now a standard part of J2SE. In JMX, JConsole, and you, John Zukowski shows you how to move from previous versions of JMX to the current release and also " how to use the new jconsole tool to display statistics for the running program."

Think you understand what design is? Your view may change after reading this republication of Robert Glass' essay The Cognitive View: A Different Look at Software Design "Methodologies aren’t design; they’re frameworks for organizing our design efforts. Languages aren’t design; they’re representations for writing down the design once we get it. Design is something that happens inside the head, inside the brain, and it happens at a speed faster than lightning."

In Projects and Communities, the Java Patterns community reminds you that the deadline for this years PLoP (Pattern Languages of Programs) submissions is May 15. PLoP is a conference where pattern authors can have their work reviewed and improved in workshops to "make them more useful and publishable."

The Mac Java Community links today to a Apple Support article on problems running Java applications and applets after upgrading to Mac OS X 10.3.9. If running java -version from the Terminal throws a Segmentation fault, you will need to reinstall one or two software updates.

The community is ready to go to work, Mike Atkinson posts to the JDK Contribution Chat thread in today's Forums. "Is it possible for a list of bugs/enhancements for the community to work on to be posted. Things that it would be nice to have but are not currently being worked on by the JDK temp."

Krokerdil has a suggestion for a different take on the try catch block with the ignore keyword. "To be able to distinguish easily between caught and handled and ignored exceptions, maybe this:try {...} ignore (WhateverException) { }would be a good idea."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

• Public Review of JSR 245 - JavaServer Fapagesces 1.2
• Public Review of JSR 252 - JavaServer Faces 1.2
• Centric CRM 3.0
• Apache JaxMe 0.4 beta
• Glazed Lists 0.9.6
• Mule 1.0
• Hibernate 3.0.1
• Adobe Picks up Macromedia for $3.2B

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• April 22-24, 2005 Lone Start Software Symposium
• April 29 - May 1, 2005 Twin Cities Software Symposium
• June 16-18, 2005 JustJava2005

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