Today I want to share my plans for the next major release of Substance look-and-feel library. I’ve started the development of version 6.0 (code-named Sonoma) about a week ago, and it’s time to talk about the major changes that are coming in this release.

• Removal of deprecated methods / classes. All APIs detailed at the end of release notes for version 5.3 have been removed from the latest 6.0dev drop. If your application is using one or more of these APIs, consult the release notes to see what you should use instead.
• Restructuring the code base. Due to lack of proper modularity in Java, some of the internal utility classes have been incorrectly viewed as published APIs by applications. Version 6.0 will have two major packages – substance.api and substance.internal. The application code can only use the api package, and the bundled test applications have been corrected to follow this guideline. For most applications this will require simple re-organization of import sections.
• Renaming the main package. In a few days the main package will be renamed from org.jvnet.substance to org.pushingpixels.substance. For most applications this will require simple re-organization of import sections.
• Moving animations to use Trident library. The internal animation engine from the Laf-Widget library will be replaced by the Trident animation library.

Smaller changes planned for Substance 6.0:

• Polishing of existing skins and a few new skins
• Support for custom decoration areas – pending performance evaluation
• Improving performance of tables
• Further support for High DPI mode

Applications using Substance will be mostly affected by package renaming and usage of Trident.

If your code is setting Substance via a fully-qualified class name, you will need to replace “org.jvnet.substance.skin…” with “org.pushingpixels.substance.api.skin…“. Otherwise you will just need to reorganize your imports section.

Switching to use Trident will require applications to add the matching trident.jar to the classpath (in addition to substance.jar). If you are running Substance-powered application in a signed WebStart environment, you will need to sign the Trident jar with the same key.

The latest 6.0dev drop of Substance contains some of the changes described above. The deprecated APIs have been removed, the packages are now organized in api / internal – but not yet under org.pushingpixels.substance, and custom animations in the test application are powered by Trident.

If you have any questions, comments, suggestions or objections, please open a discussion on the project forums or mailing lists.