JSR 295: the future of observable lists?
JSR 295 will create a spec to bind plain old Java Objects to Swing components. Its a great idea which will increase productivity for Swing developers.Ultimately the spec will include bindings from java.util.List to components like JTable and JList. This tiny subproblem is what I've spent the last 3 years working on with Glazed Lists, and if done right it will make Glazed Lists mostly irrelevant.
What I fear is that should JSR 295 be done wrong, it may still make Glazed Lists irrelevant! Therefore I think my best option is to embrace JSR 295, and hope that someday Glazed Lists will complement it rather than competing with it. This is the same approach as Hibernate+EJB 3.0 or util.concurrent+java.util.concurrent, albeit not nearly as high profile.
Therefore over the next few months I plan to blog about Glazed Lists' design, with hopes of influencing development of the JSR. I'm going to get into low level API and implementation details, discussing both the strengths and weaknesses of our approach. Finally, note that I have offered to donate all or any of Glazed Lists source code to the project.
