Homepage: www.jxproject.com

Here's a full featured project management tool (you should be using a project management tool) and it's free (it's free because there's a small banner add in the upper right hand corner of the main window). With jxProject you can create Gantt (task dependency) charts, schedule resources, do resource leveling, and print everything - so your boss has something to hang on his wall. The 1.0 version of jxProject is due out around JavaOne time this year (June 2003) and the plan is to offer a version without the banner ads for a small fee. If you've got a project worth managing, check out jxProject.

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Homepage: www.lambdacs.com/debugger/debugger.html

Bil Lewis has created a debugger that lets you travel backwards and forwards in time. The basic idea is to run the program in a mode where interesting events, like setting a value or calling a method, are timestamped and recorded. The debugger uses this data to create a visualization of the program's historical record. The debugger implementation collects the data efficiently by inserting timestamped event-generating code directly into .class files. You can tune the process for your debugging task by advising the debugger about what classes to trace. The ODB is free (GPL) and web started and it was recently featured on java.sun.com.

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Homepage: www.jidesoft.com

If you're thinking about building a custom IDE, you could start with NetBeans, as the companies listed here have done. However, if you're after something small and want to have more flexibility, then the IDE framework and components from JIDESoft should fill the bill. According to their web site the Docking Framework "enables the user-interface style of drag and drop, dockable windows and can quickly turn your application into modern style, easy-to-use and flexible application." The JIDE components complement the framework. You could build this stuff yourself in Swing, but that might be wasting time - since JIDESoft already has.

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Homepage: www.mac-systems.de/jampaktuell.htm

Jens Hohl has developed a nice MP3 playing Winamp clone called JamP. The GUIs you see below are really Winamp 2.x Skins displayed by his player written in pure Java. Looks great, sounds great.

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Homepage: ganttproject.sf.net

Alexandre Thomas sent us a pointer to GanttProject which is (no surprise here) a Gantt chart based project planning app. Work on the GPL'd software started while Thomas was a student at the University of Marne-la-Vallee (France) and has continued with the support of a big group of OSS developers. The GUI resembles MrProject, a project planner for GNOME.

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Homepage: www.karneim.com/jrexxlab

Michael Karneim sent us a pointer to this fascinating app just as we began production of Swing Sightings #15. Somehow we managed to misfile it until now and we apologize for keeping it under wraps! Jrexx-Lab is a rich visualization for regular expressions, and comes with its own regular expression library - jrexx. Michael provided this description:

"Jrexx-Lab displays regular expressions as finite state automatons (FSA) graphs. Using this tool you can create, edit, analyze and test regular expressions. Since jrexx handles regular expressions as finite state automatons, jrexx-Lab does present them graphically as typical networks of states and transitions. The jrexx library handles regular expressions as sets of character strings and provides all basic set operations (unify, intersect, subtract and complement) which are available from the GUI also."

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Homepage: www.fluxtime.com

Marc Winter sent us a pointer to an interesting gallery of simple animations that were rendered by a special applet. Although the animations aren't going strike fear into the heart of Pixar, the fact that they were created with a very capable tool should intrigue anyone who's building interactive banner ads or publishing animations for entertainment. Marc sent us the following description of FluxTime:

"FluxTime is a new vector graphics and animation software tailored around the creative process. It produces images and animations in the new FluxTime Clip format. FluxTime Clips can be still or animated, are vector based and fully scalable, can be integrated into other FluxTime Clips, can contain background or interactive sounds, support hyperlinks to web pages or other FluxTime Clips, can be shown locally, on the internet, or installed as screensavers, can be controlled with scripting languages, and are very very small."

We're hoping some of our colleagues in the visual arts will give FluxTime a spin!

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Homepage: www.jvider.com

A company called UAB BBD SOFT in Lithuania has released a new Swing GUI builder called "jvider". Jvider is a direct manipulation style WYSIWYG editor for GridBagLayout-based Swing GUIs. JVider generates code for applications (JFrames) or applets. There's a great story on the site that describes the inspiration for the tool: creating loads of complex screens for a dental clinic client database and registration system. The dental clinic app has been deployed, and we're hoping to give you a look at that in some future edition of this column.

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Homepage: www.majinwar.com

If you're looking for a high quality throwback to the Mortal Kombat style fighting games from the 1990s, MajinWar is for you. If you're looking for all the hacking and chopping and gorific fighting fun that you remember - available in full screen mode - then look no further. MajinWar is a 1.4.1 plugin enabled applet, that's also available as a download that you can install and run full screen. The artwork is top notch and the balloon style cartoon dialog is, well... those are fighting words!

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Homepage: www.lafros.com/home/juice

Author Rob Dickens of Latterfrosken Software Development Limited, in the UK, sent us this description of their new UI framework for Swing: "The Java User-Interface Client (JUICe) Application Framework is of interest to anyone developing client applications or applets (i.e. 'rich' clients). It supplements the Swing classes to allow, for example, apps to double as either applications or applets, commands (ICmd implementations) to be run in a separate thread and combined as toggles, exceptions thrown by commands to be handled transparently, and to provide components which flash and beep, for use in realtime monitoring and control type applications."

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Homepage: www.wheeloyum.com

Web service clients aren't always the compelling eye popping dynamos we hope they'd be. More often than not they have an important role in the machinery of some business, but not necessarily in the day to day existence of those of us in the software trenches.

Fear not, for today we conclude the 16th Swing Sightings column with an application that's sure to become part of your daily routine. It's called the "Wheel 'O Yum" (catchy, eh?) and it's designed to help you and your software meal-mates decide where to eat. In fact it will help you make a really good decision about where to eat, based on statistics, sensible heuristics, and just a pinch of randomness.

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