Project Looking Glass: Its Architecture and Sneak Preview of the API
Bring a richer user experience to the desktop and to applications, through 3D windowing and visualization capabilities. This article covers Project Looking Glass' main features and API, its basic organization, and the functionality of important classes.

[ 06 Dec ][ News ]: NetBeans IDE Book Excerpts Now Available
The NetBeans IDE Field Guide is planned for release by Prentice Hall in June 2005 and will cover NetBeans IDE 4.1. Draft chapters on standard projects and freeform projects are now downloadable in PDF format from:http://www.netbeans.org/kb/articles/NBFieldGuide.html

NetBeans IDE 4.1 Early Access 2 Released
The NetBeans open source project is proud to announce Early Access release 2 of the NetBeans IDE 4.1.

For downloads of this release go to:
http://www.netbeans.org/downloads/index.html

For the quick start guide, see:
http://www.netbeans.org/kb/41/quickstart-j2ee.html

This early access release has over 15 new modules for developing Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) 1.4 applications and is built on the novel and breakthrough NetBeans 4.0 technology. Users can developprograms for Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE), Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME), and now J2EE Enterprise Java Bean (EJB)components and Web Services. Using the free Sun Java System Application Server Platform Edition 8.1 Release Candidate as the deployment runtime and with NetBeans guiding the developer and automatically building the underlying J2EE infrastructure, learning about and developing J2EE 1.4 applications has never been easier. To further assist the developer, J2EE Java BluePrints catalog is also included.

With a pure Java technology integrated development environment and cross platform availability for Windows, Linux and the Solaris Operating System, this is the best time to get a look at the future.

The next release is the Beta release and planned for February, 2005.

For more information on NetBeans 4.1 features and schedule you can visit the NetBeans 4.1 Planning Page.

JDBC RowSet Implementations Tutorial (PDF)
This tutorial explains how to use the standard JDBC RowSet implementations that are provided as part of J2SE 5.0. Get up to speed with each RowSet definition and benefit from improved scalability and robustness.

Java talks at this year's OSCon
Call for papers deadline is Feb 13 for the O'Reilly Open Source Convention

Creating Professionaly Looking .NET Applications? How Ironic

Creating Professionaly Looking .NET Applications
The world is turning upside down. People in the Joel on Software forum ask for professionally looking look and feels for .NET applications -- comparable to Java look and feel implementations.

I love this. Look and feel gets a bad wrap all the time with Swing. Now what are people asking for...

AspectJ and AspectWerkz
Joining forces to battle cross-cutting concerns

ClientJava.com Links(8) - Calendar Components, Eclipse RCP Apps, SWT/J
Review - SWT/JFace in Action
SWT and JFace are the graphical libraries developed by IBM as an alternative to Swing to improve performance of GUI applications (specifically Eclipse) written in Java. This book offers a thorough introduction to SWT/JFace. The authors avoid getting into a Swing vs. SWT/JFace debate although they do provide a comparison of the two libraries...

NachoCalendar 0.20 released

Read the full content here.

ClientJava.com Links(3) - JFormDesigner, New Eclipse UI, JDIC 0.8.7 R
JFormDesigner 1.0 - Swing GUI designer
The JFormDesigner project has announced the release of version 1.0 Final. "JFormDesigner is an WYSIWYG GUI designer for Swing user interfaces. It provides a lot of powerful features and supports JGoodies FormLayout, TableLayout, GridBagLayout and other standard layout managers. The advanced GridBagLayout support allows the specification of horizontal and vertical gaps (as in TableLayout)."There is a changelog for version 1.0 RC1 through final available.

Looking forward for new Eclipse UI. / Eclipse
Today Eclipse team will release 3.1M4. From the beginning of this week they have been running integration builds few times a day, so I took one more or less bugless and took a closer look on new features. Most notable change is new look of the Preferences dialog.

JDIC release 0.8.7 is available now
What is new in this release:

*Desktop Mailer support Mozilla Thunderbird on Windows/Linux/Solaris
*WebBrowser work fine when browsing https site.
*Automatically set JAVA_HOME and java.library.path property for TrayIcon.
*Environment variables are setted by code automatically, you just need to add the jdic.jar to your classpath.
*Fix several critical bugs of TrayIcon.
*Fix several critical bugs of Packager.
*Remove several unnecessary library to build jdic.
*Refine code for init package.

Read the full content here.