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Swing Usability: Make it easier to provide feedback
Projects that are vastly larger than Swing (F.E. the Linux kernel) have public mailing lists where anyone is able to subscribe and participate with folks who are interested as well as the _authors_ of the various components. I feel disheartened when I send out a bug report to java.com with a perfect small 15 line program that shows the exact error and it takes 11 months, 20 days (my current record) to receive the response, "Hello, sorry for the late response. Are you still seeing this?". [..] A good example of how it should be done is the mailing list Florian Bomers (Sun) set up for the Java Sound API. I think a lot more valuable feedback would make it back to the swing team with this approach. Cheers.  — 

The Mythical Man Month: Chapter 11: Throwing one away
What about doing your prototype with a technology that just won't be used in your organization for a production version? You could select a language that will not be supported by operations - Python, Smalltalk, Lisp or anything exotic enough that operations won't touch it (note that I'm *not* implying that either of these languages would not be fit for production use). Anorther approach is [to] base a prototype on a library that is not being supported any more. That takes care of the problem also. — 

Swing Usability: Psychology of Swing
Consumers, including us, don't usually care how a product works, only how good they look using it. For example, many people don't know the engineering involved with a car. They just want to get in, hit the gas, and go. They do care, however, how they look driving it. [..] Out of the box, Swing should implement a polished UI. Whoever decided on the default LAF needs to be fired for that knuckle head decision. — 

Also in Java Today

The Eyedropper tool
Where's the eyedropper tool for choosing colors? In his latest Swing hack The Eyedropper tool, Joshua Marinacci provides a cheat to handle the limitations he describes because "getting a screenpixel requires native access, usually locked off from Java programs. Java 1.3 introduced a new method to the Robot class, getPixelColor(), which can retrieve the color anywhere on the screen. The problem is that you don't get mouse events once the cursor leaves your JFrame. Fine if you only want to select colors from your own application, but we want to select anywhere on the screen."

JSP 2.0: The New Deal, Part 4
Hans Bergsten wraps up his four part series JSP 2.0: The New Deal with a look at developing custom tag libraries. With JSP 2.0 you can develop a "custom action as a tag file. A tag file is a plain text file where you use JSP elements for all dynamic parts, just as in a regular JSP page. It has the same purpose as a Java tag handler: to provide the logic for a custom action. The main differences between a tag file and a JSP page are that a tag file has a .tag filename extension, uses a tag directive instead of a page directive, and lets you declare input and output with a few new directives that are only valid in tag files." Bergsten also details the new simple tag handler API.

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