Swing Sightings Volume 22
August 18th, 2005
One of the most exciting
kinds of e-mail that the Swing/JFC team receive is a product announcement
for a new JavaTM application that features a Swing GUI. A close runner-up
is the URL for a new game or a compelling never-before-seen applet.
Over the years we've
collected many links to this information. In fact, if you walked down
the hallways here you would see the walls plastered with hundreds of screenshots
from applications developed outside of Sun. Therefore, we have decided
to launch a Swing Connection feature to share this bounty. Don't expect
a comprehensive survey; these are applications that we bumped into or
that found us.
This feature is called
"Swing Sightings" and here are several new applications we've happened
upon recently. Previous Swing Sightings are available in the numbered
web pages listed below. These applications don't come with our special
seal of approval (we don't have one) and, although we may have tried some
of them out, we don't claim to have really tested any of them. They're
here because, based on the descriptions and the screenshots on their web
sites, they look like good examples of what is possible with Swing.
The
button indicates that if you have Java Web Start installed, you can launch
the application by just simply clicking on the the button. Note: if you
don't have Java Web Start installed, you can get it here.
If you know of an
application that should be considered for this Swing Connection feature,
we'd love to hear about it. Please
contact us.
| GLIPS - Graffiti SVG Graphics Editor |
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Web Site: glipssvgeditor.sourceforge.net
The GLIPS Graffiti editor is an open source SVG graphics editor
based on Batik
and developed by ITRIS.
It features shape tools (rectangles, circles, ellipses, lines,
polygons, and polylines), path tools (Bezier curves, conversion
to a path, union, subtraction, and intersection), basic text
support, and image import (SVG or Bitmap). Supported transformations
are translate, resize, rotate, and skew. A property manager
is available for each object, and a resource manager takes
care of gradients, patterns, markers, and filters. It requires
Java VM 1.4.1 or higher. It is a part of the GLIPS Project,
which aims to be a PLC cross-platform development environment.
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| Jake2
- bytonic |
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Web Site: bytonic.de
bytonic
is a Java software development team from Chemnitz in Germany.
They've been around for a couple of years and if you're wondering
if they've got skills (and stamina), check out Jake2.
Jake2
is a port, from C to Java, of the infamous Quake2 first person
shooter from id
Software. All roughly 100,000 lines of the original C
implementation. The work was done with a combination of custom
tools and plain old rewriting. In addition to being a feat
of translation, Jake2 is one of the most impressive web started
applications I've encountered. Everything from the current
version of the JOGL OpenGL bindings to a Quake2 game map was
downloaded and installed automatically. Once started, the
game played exactly the way I remembered it.
Game performance
was excellent although I have to admit that I was more of
a victim than a player. It's just that I'm way out
of practice. I'll have to work on that.
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| ZipCreator |
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Web Site: www.zipcreator.com
A great looking cross-platform (Mac OS X, Windows, Linux) zip utility
that's free! I gave zipcreator a brief trial run and found it to
be fast and easy to use. Nick Hurst (nick at zipcreator dot com)
sent us a pointer to the zipcreator
web site which includes a comprehensive and very professional
looking user manual along with the free application download.
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| ByteMe
& TwoMore - University of Technology at Darmstadt, Germany |
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Wed Site: www.pi.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/se2004/byteme
Kai Stroh ([k.stroh at web dot de) sent us a pointer to this new
JOGL based visualization tool called TwoMore. It was developed by
a team of six students at the University of Technology in Darmstadt
(Germany) who have named themselves ByteMe.
Questionable
choice of names aside, it's a pretty interesting app that displays
a semantic web in two or three dimensions.
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| TrackNShare
- Memetex, Inc. |
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Web Site:
memetex.net
Victor Coleman from Memetex, Inc. provided us with this description
of the of the product: TrackNShare is a low-admin, cross-platform,
team-based, highly-secure, client-server, real time business (or
personal) process manager. Changes are immediately pushed from the
server to clients so the team is always up-to-date. A rich Swing
GUI represents processes, tasks, templates and users with hierarchy,
property, and graph panels. TrackNShare features fine access control,
universal content, 2 Gig file/directory attachments, alarms, email
notification, graph cycles, rendezvous or parallel activities, pooled
or single task assignment, constraint-based forwarding, event-triggered
Java scripting, and dynamic alteration of processes. Databases supported
are embedded Hsqldb (default), external Mysql, or embedded Cloudscape
Network Server (next release 1.2). TrackNShare scales up using a
federated architecture of multiple team servers interconnected by
users who belong to more than one team, and scales down to plain
workstations. TrackNShare is low-cost because the Memetex, Inc.
profit model is not based on software prices but on the need for
professional consulting services to analyze your workflow and construct
effective templates that streamline collaborative processes.
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| TJI
- Kinabaloo |
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Web Site: www.kinabaloo.com
TJI is a small
(1.3M download) commercial IDE for the Java programming language
with support for building Swing GUIs, writing servlets and JSP,
creating javadoc or UML, and so on. It comes with an integrated
database and web server.
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| Thought
Mapper - Aviz |
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Web Site: www.avizsoft.com
Karan Gujral (karan at avizsoft dot com) from Aviz Software in Maharashtra
India, sent us a pointer and description of this app: The Aviz Thought
Mapper is a new application that helps you to visually organize
thoughts and ideas around a central theme by creating a Mind Map.
The tool is extremely simple and intuitive to use, supporting full
keyboard navigation and editing. Thought Mapper allows editing,
saving, printing and publishing (html, pdf, rtf, image, presentation)
of your thought maps. This is an application written in the Java
programming language and is currently supported on Microsoft Windows
and Linux. The Windows version integrates with Outlook for contacts,
tasks and appointments.
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| Summit
Groupware |
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Web Site: www.powdersoftware.com
Summit Groupware is a web started email/calendar/contacts/etc collaboration
client for Unix (check out the JDS screenshot!), Mac, and Microsoft
Windows. The application suite was written by Powder Software up
in Calgary Canada. Looks like the Alloy look and feel at work, very
nice!
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| SCRIBE
- Gestalt |
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Web Site: www.reportgenerator.org
This item comes to us from Alex Molochnikov, who's at the Gestalt
corporation:
SCRIBE is a report generator that is based on graphical programming
concepts, allowing the developers to define the process of retrieving
data from the database tables, performing the necessary calculations,
creating pie, bar and line charts, and formatting data for printing.
SCRIBE performs all these tasks in the form of an executable graphical
flowchart. Printing is done through WYSIWYG page layout forms (print
templates).
SCRIBE can also
update database tables by inserting, updating and deleting rows,
using graphical flowcharts with database-editing components. Its
functionality can be extended by adding custom Java code; third-party
Java applications can run reports programmatically using the SCRIBE
API library.
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| QuickCalc
- JayDee Technology Ltd. |
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Home: www.jaydeetechnology.co.uk/quickcalc.htm
QuickCalc
is a 100% Pure Java Spreadsheet component that has been proven in
a range of applications and that can be easily integrated into any
Swing-based Java application. It was developed by JayDee
Technology Ltd, an organization based in the UK that specializes
in Java technology. It is currently used by The Legal Services Commission
of the UK Government, within our own systems and several other organizations
including Nomura Securities International, Inc. and Data Burst Technologies,
Inc.
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| Omniscope
- Iokio |
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Web Site: www.iokio.com
Steve Spencer (info at iokio dot com) from Iokio was kind enough
to send us a description of Iokio Ltd's recently-launched flagship
product, Omniscope: Omniscope, a desktop application developed in
Java, allows both home users and professionals to browse data and
media using colourful and interactive data visualizations. Drill-down
through pie charts and scatter plots; overlay data points on a wide
range of configurable maps; browse images and create slideshows;
create portfolios with a few mouse clicks; rapidly filter data in
an enjoyable visual manner. "Omniscope turns data visualization
into a video game." Data can be opened from Excel spreadsheets,
CSV files, or any JDBC database including Oracle, Access, and SQL
Server. "Omniscope does for data what Acrobat reader did for
text."
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| MyJXTA |
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Web Site: myjxta2.jxta.org
James Todd, gonzo
developer on the second generation MyJXTA project, has been keeping
us posted on the all the latest developments - notably the new 2.3.2
release. The JXTA project home page describes the app like this:
MyJXTA is a web started JXTA Technology based collaboration application.
Designed from the ground up to be easy to use, modify, extend and
deploy in enterprise settings. Its features include: group chat,
secure 1:1 chat, content sharing (cms.jxta.org), rich content (text/html)
chat editor, shell integration (shell.jxta.org) text-to-speech (FreeTTS)
live graphs (prefuse), and much more.
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| Jaikoz |
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Web Site: www.jthink.net/jaikoz
Developer Paul Taylor (paultaylor at jthink dot net) sent us this
description of Jaikoz: Jaikoz is an audio tagger specifically designed
for managing large music collections. In this first release it supports
the standard ID3v1 and ID3v2 tagging format for MP3 Files. It aims
to give you full control of your editing and provide as much automation
as possible. Jaikoz uses a spreadsheet view to allow you to edit
information more quickly than other applications and provides many
autoformatting tasks that do most of the work for you. For example,
it compares your MP3s to each other and, using this information,
it can correct missing information and spelling mistakes. We know
of no other tagger that does this! Jaikoz can extract information
from a filename into the tag without you having to specify the format
for the filename. The screen is split horizontally and automatically
synchronised to show the original record and the changes you have
made so you can compare both at the same time. Jaikoz allows you
to access complex fields as well as simple fields from the spreadsheet
view. Jaikoz has been developed and tested on Microsoft Windows
XP, OSX Panther and Redhat Linux Fedoura.
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| FreeQueryBuilder |
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Web Site: querybuilder.sourceforge.net/
Here's a brief description of this app, from the web site: "With
FreeQueryBuilder, you can create SQL queries without directly writing
SQL. A diagram pane presents a graphic display of the tables you
have selected from the data connection. It also shows any join relationships
among them. When you make a change in the diagram pane, the SQL-Syntax
pane are updated to reflect your change."
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| FreeMind |
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Web Site:: freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
FreeMind is
software to help you organize your ideas, or as the developers put
it: "free mind-mapping software". FreeMind is intended
to be similar the Windows-only (and not free) product called MindManager
and we were pleased to read the FreeMind developers' claims that
their pure Java application performs better!
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| DBWrench |
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Web Site: www.dbwrench.com
Harnek Randhawa (harnek at nizana dot com) was kind enough to send
us a pointer to DbWrench (1.0 just released in November 2004) along
with this tidy description: "DbWrench is a multi-vendor, cross-platform
database design and round-trip engineering software. Its features
include: a syntax highlighting SQL query editor, support for many
of todays most popular databases, a graphic entity relation diagram
(ERD) designer, and the ability to forward and reverse engineer
databases. DbWrench is written in pure Java allowing it function
on numerous operating system platforms. DbWrench's multi vendor
and multi platform functionality makes it ideal for heterogeneous
database environments."
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| Barchan |
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Web Site: www.barchan.net
Earlier this year, Michael Schenck posted some screenshots on the
JDNC
forums to show off a skillful use of the JDNC Highlighter API
in JXTreeTable. The screenshot was from a very polished-looking
new application from Barchan. Here's the product description from
the Barchan site (don't miss the kind words about J2SE!):
"Barchan's
Infrastructure Asset Management Application is the end-to-end solution
for horizontal infrastructure asset management. The application
currently supports road networks and is being expanded to additionally
support water, sewer, and drainage networks. Barchan's application
is user friendly, with the look and feel of a desktop application,
but the flexibility of a web enabled enterprise application. Using
Sun Microsystems' Java 2 Platform, Barchan's application is built
on leading edge 21st century technology."
Michael sent
along a geek-friendly description of the application's arhcitecture.
Wow:
"The Barchan
application is a client/server application that makes heavy use
of J2EE. The rich client is delivered via Web Start and communicates
to the server through WSDL/SOAP over HTTPS, pretty much behaving
like a desktop application. It also integrates on the back end to
ESRI's ArcIMS platform for mapping and to a Construction Cost Database
which actually runs in .NET using SQL Server (talks to it using
SOAP through a JAXB generated interface)."
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| DB
Solo |
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Web Site: www.dbsolo.com
Marko Hantula (marko at dbsolo dot com) sent us a pointer to a new
product for database application developers called DB Solo. The
app uses some great Swing libraries, like JGraph,
JGoodies Looks and many
others. Here's the (slightly edited) product description he provided:
"DB Solo is a powerful database development and management
tool for developers and DBAs. DB Solo has an intuitive user interface
that allows you to explore and manage your database objects as well
as execute your own ad-hoc queries. DB Solo supports most relational
database products available today including Oracle, Microsoft SQL
Server, Sybase and MySQL. You can manage all of these DBMS products
— even at the same time — from a single application. DB
Solo runs on Microsoft Windows, Solaris and Linux platforms. In
addition to viewing objects such as schemas, tables, indexes, views,
tablespaces, users, roles, sessions and stored procedures you can
also view, edit, print and export data of tables or results of your
ad-hoc queries. You can also graphically view your table's foreign-key
relationships with other tables. You don't need to know SQL to be
able to navigate and explore your database structures. Ad-hoc queries
can be entered in a query window that supports multiple result-sets,
printing, persisted query history, exporting, image viewing and
searching within results. DB Solo also contains a table creator
tool that allows you to create tables without knowing SQL. The table
creator allows you to define table columns and constraints using
a simple interface and you can preview the SQL before the table
is created."
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| BidNobble |
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Web Site: bidnobble.com
The BidNobble site begins with a blurb that's just the right size
for a Swing Sighting. Here it is (slightly edited): "BidNobble
is an auction tool for eBay users written in the Java programming
language. You can track eBay auctions and the snipe tool allows
you to schedule your bid to be placed seconds before the auction
ends, avoiding driving the price high early in the auction's life.
Listed among the application's many features, like a clock "that's
synchronized to eBay time", and a "snipe tool", is
the fact that the app is easy to use and free of charge."
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| Aqua
Data Studio 4.0 |
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Web Site: www.aquafold.com
We covered Aqua Data Studio about two years ago, in Swing
Sightings #13. Since then there have been some significant developments
(even a press
release); Niels Gron (NielsGron at aquafold dot com) sent us
an update, along with new screenshots. As before, Aqua Data Studio
is: A universal database tool for building, managing and maintaining
enterprise relational databases. Aqua Data Studio includes support
for all major database platforms such as Oracle 8i/9i, IBM DB2,
Informix Dynamic Server, Sybase Adaptive Server, Sybase Anywhere,
Microsoft SQL Server and the open source databases MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Developed with the Java programming language, Aqua Data Studio supports
all major operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OSX,
Solaris and the Linux operating system.
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| blue
- Music Composition Environment for the Csound Synthesizer |
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Web Site: csounds.com/stevenyi/blue
Steven Yi (stevenyi at gmail dot com] sent us a pointer to an open
source application called "blue" (and so it is) along
with the brief description below. "blue is a music composition
environment for use with the Csound synthesizer. blue features a
timeline that uses plugin SoundObjects to generate scores for your
music. It has built-in support for Python and JavaScript scripting,
a microtonal PianoRoll, and many other features that empower users
to create music in many ways."
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