For learning a new language or framework, I tend to use tasks I’ve solved before – this way I’m more focused on the new platform instead of the problem itself. One such task is a sudoku solver, another tic-tac-toe. One rainy afternoon, trying to escape boreout at work, I mindlessly typed apt-get install tictactoe on my Ubuntu workstation, and I discovered that my Ruby tic-tac-toe client from 2002 is still in the Debian/Ubuntu repositories (and it actually works!).
I wanted to play around with Swing/Netbeans, so after a couple of evenings here’s the Java/Swing version (but this time, I hopefully did not mess up the negamax implementation): JTicTacToe (Webstart) – Sources
It was actually quite fun, except that I gave up forcing an initial size for the main application window. Seems like there’s no easy way of achieving this with the Swing Application Framework.
Just Five Minutes 