The latest Java desktop news in the last week from the Swing and JavaFX worlds.

With Maven 3.x we have made our best attempt to listen users, find out what they need and want, and make reasonable preparations and plans to fix the problems, implement useful features, and create the integration points for working properly with third party systems like Nexus and Hudson. While there have been many new feature requests — and we have many new features done or in the works — the number one concern is backward compatibility. Maven 3.x makes an ardent attempt to be 100% backward compatible with Maven 2.x. All your Maven 2.x builds should work out of the box using 3.x without change to your projects. We simply can’t cause pain to the existing user base. We are very cognizant that even small changes can have a huge impact and so we have tried achieve complete Maven 2.x fidelity with Maven 3.x.

Hadoop is getting more popular these days. Lets look at what it is good at and what not.

Spring is a powerful application framework that can be used across any layer in your application. For example, you can use Spring to manage only your data access layer or you can use Spring to provide remote services for your swing client. In this article, I will explain how to get started with Spring by developing a simple java application.

The Health Center provides live information and recommendations about classes being loaded, the virtual machine environment, garbage collection, locking, and profiling. This article introduces you to the Health Center and shows an example of how it can be used to check the impact of a source code change in a Web application.

After trying for weeks to integrate Flex and BlazeDS into Grails, in vain, I’ve decided to come back to vanilla Spring/Hibernate for Conference Guide server. And I took the opportunity to upgrade my todolist sample application, the one featured in the article published both on this blog and on the Adobe Developer Connection.

So I finally got some time to sit down and write, after being knee deep in work the past month or two. And without a doubt, I wanted to write about what has been heckling and annoying me over the past month. I am an ardent defender of Java as a good language, especially defending it from Misko day in and day out, but even I will agree that it does suck at times. So today, Java, the gloves are off. I love you, but this is the way things are

Learning UML in simple and easy steps : A beginner's tutorial containing complete knowledge of UML architecture, diagrams, notations examples with examples.

Guice is a really pleasant DI framework that does its job with brilliant simplicity from a developer point of view. Guice has more than DI capabilities though, as long as you spice it up with extensions libraries. Today I'll show you the AOP capabilities that Guice offers.

This article discusses binding data, from forms to objects, in the Spring MVC web framework, including the use of custom PropertyEditors and the options available for registering such editors.

.Net 4 is looking more and more attractive. I absolutely loved and at the same time was jealous of the LINQ feature in .Net. Now with PLINQ (Parallel LINQ) it just become so attractive that it's almost illegal. At least that's how I see it compared to the language features in Java, which hasn't changed since 1.5.

This is a brief entry about how an interviewer should conduct a Java based interview. I have been on both side of the table and this is only based on my own observations. I think most interviews that I attended in the past, and possibly some I have conducted myself, focus on the basic concept. I accept that developers should be aware of the language principles, but how can an interviewer test more advanced principles?

A side by side display of the various blend modes that are available within JavaFX.

The first official Lucid Imagination training in Europe will take place in Amsterdam on 30th November. This 3 days instructor led training will introduce you to the world of Solr and the development of open source enterprise search solutions.

Version 2.0.3 offers a BIG new feature for URL validation - Everyone should be afraid of user input, and parsing values from the URL is no different. But be not afraid! It is now possible to attach JSF validators to URL and Query parameters. This functionality parallels the new > tag provided in JSF2, but also provides additional hooks into Validation error handling.

See how the upcoming Excelsior JET 7.0 can help you turn standalone JavaFX application into a native executable and ship it as a conventional Windows installer without dependency on the JRE or the JavaFX Runtime.