Swing 1.1.1 Debuts;
Kestrel Work Begins

By Mark Andrews

It's official -- JFC^TM/Swing 1.1.1 is not a beta product anymore. It's now an official release, and you can download it at no cost from the JFC Web site. JFC/Swing 1.1.1 has many bug fixes, a collection of performance improvements, and several new features such as multi-line labels and HTML in all text-based components. For more information, see the Editor's Desk column on Page 2.

Meanwhile, the Swing Team was hard at work on the JFC/Swing portion of Kestrel -- the code name for Java^TM 2 Standard Edition, Version 1.3 -- which is scheduled for release in the first quarter of 2000. For details, see the Special Report on Kestrel in this issue.

Concurrency in GUIs has often been a subject of controversy. Swing, while not entirely thread-safe, offers some support for concurrency in key areas. This article, by JFC/Swing text package author Timothy Prinzing, examines the support of concurrency provided by the text package, and then shows how to perform text layout asynchronous to the GUI event thread in an interactive display.

Even before JFC/Swing 1.1.1 graduated from beta status and became an officially released product, the Swing Team was already hard at work on its next project: the JFC/Swing portion of JDK 1.3, code-named "Kestrel," which is currently scheduled for release during the first quarter of 2000.

This Special Report summarizes all the changes in the JFC/Swing API that are now being planned for incorporation into Kestrel -- the code name for Java^TM 2 Standard Edition, Version 1.3 -- and contains links to a pair of comprehensive API-documents that lay out all the details of the new changes.