Daniel Leuck's Blog (146)

I'd like to share two random trains of thought in the area of free open source software. The first is my continued annoyance with the likes of Richard Stallman and his acolytes for their insistence that all software must be free and that commercial software vendors are somehow unethical. I hear this refrain time and time again on message boards and at geek fests around the world. What…

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I recently discovered two interesting new sites for natural language learning. The first was presented by TechHui member Gabe Morris at Unconferenz last Saturday. Gabe demoed Yabla, a site that offers video content in Spanish and French from television and…

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According to a recently published whitepaper, Google is currently processing 20 petabytes of data every day. I find it amazing that their search engine and applications like Google Docs still have nearly instantaneous response times.

Google just added a slew of new features to their already impressive Google Docs. Perhaps the most interesting is the ability to publish presentations as AJAX widgets. File management has also improved to the point you really feel like you are using a desktop application. Google once again proves it is the king of AJAX! The fact they seem to be completely ignoring Flex is…

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I just ran across a new Swing L&F called Nimbus that has renewed my interest in Swing. Its the first L&F that looks as good as OSX and Vista and it is entirely vector based. This is important because the resolution indepence means it looks good on the new high definition screens.

Additionally, all the painting is done with Painter delegates which are easily reused on custom components. This has always been a pain point for swing. Its…

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I've invested years of my life in Swing development, so its a little scary to even pose the question, "Is Swing Dead?" Bank of America, our largest customer, used to do a significant amount of Swing development. These days all new projects are using WinForms, WPF, or Flex. All of these technologies are very good, and have big marketing bucks behind them (Microsoft and Adobe respectively.) With Sun gasping for air and IBM backing a competing toolkit, what will happen to Swing?

Swing…

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