Say, remember that lively discussion on the future of Swing that I linked to last week? Well, it got lively enough for Danny Coward, Sun’s client-side chief architect, to respond on his own blog. His piece is well worth the read for Sun’s take on the matter — which, if I can summarize probably too succinctly, is that Swing is very important to Sun and its customers; isn’t being built out as fast as JavaFX because it’s more mature; is being incrementally advanced, with a particular eye towards improving performance; is the foundation to a number of technologies, including some aspects of JavaFX; and isn’t going to be replaced any time soon by something backwards incompatible. That’s all very well and interesting, if kind of squishy, but I was amused by how Coward signed off:But if what you want is revolution not evolution, if you would like to see bigger, more radical changes inside Swing, then please consider that you have all the source code for Swing together with the supporting infrastructure to create a project and broadcast its existence at OpenJDK.org. It’s why, in part, we set up OpenJDK: to make it easier for you to bring the next big RIA idea to life.In other words, if you need Swing 2.0 so badly, make it a fork! This is the ultimate trump card in open source projects — if you want a feature so badly, go ahead an implement it yourself, smarty. Of course, you can argue that, no matter how well implemented someone’s pet Swing 2.0 project would be, it would lack the sort of universal value that a core part of the language would have, but that hasn’t stopped Giles from taking up the challenge and registering s2.dev.java.net. Open Source