💔 marks an incompatible API / binary change
😻 marks new features
🤷‍♀️ marks bug fixes and general improvements

General

• 💔 Java 9 is the new minimum requirement for build time and runtime of all Radiance modules

Modules

• 💔 Removed Spoonbill (SVNKit-powered implementation of Flamingo’s breadcrumb bar
• 😻 Added Meteor – Kotlin extensions for core Swing APIs
• 😻 Added Ember – Kotlin extensions for SubstanceCortex APIs
• 🤷‍♀️ Renamed Kormorant to Plasma
• 🤷‍♀️ All core Kotlin modules (Ember, Meteor, Plasma) moved under the top-level kotlin-ext folder
• 🤷‍♀️ Jitterbug (visual tool for editing Substance color schemes) renamed to Apollo
• 😻 Added Ion – sample walkthroughs for replacing SwingWorker with Kotlin coroutines

Neon

• 💔 An almost complete rewrite of NeonIcon APIs
• 💔 Most Flamingo and Substance APIs moved off of ResizableIcon and to ResizableIcon.Factory
• 💔 Moved some icon colorization APIs from Substance to Neon
• 💔 Removed usage of UITable from FontPolicy API

Photon

• 💔 Removed default public no-argument constructor from bundled templates for Java and Kotlin targets

Trident

• 💔 Moved to builder-based construction of timelines

Substance

• 😻 New Graphite Electric skin
• 😻 New APIs for working with complex renderers, including built-in animations
• 🤷‍♀️ Fix for incorrect offsets of rotated texts
• 🤷‍♀️ Fix for inconsistent font metrics between preferred size and rendering passes
• 🤷‍♀️ Fix for incorrect vertical position of icons in JOptionPane
• 🤷‍♀️ Fix for crash in showing JColorChooser dialog
• 💔 Moved all three Office 2007 skins to the extras pack

Flamingo

• 💔 Moved all lower-level components (command button, command button strip. command popup menu, command button panel) to the new world based on content models, presentation models and projections
• 😻 Added support for placing any ribbon content (including components, application menu links and galleries) in the taskbar
• 😻 Added support for taskbar overflow (including built-in horizontal scrolling)
• 💔 Keytips for taskbar content are controlled by keytip policy
• 😻 Added support for separate keytips on action and secondary / popup areas of command buttons
• 😻 Added support for global contextual menu on the ribbon
• 🤷‍♀️ Added complete documentation

The first Radiance release focused on bringing all the different Swing open-source projects that I’ve been working on since 2005 under one roof. This release (code-named Beryl) is about making them work much better together. And it’s also about making it just a bit easier to use Flamingo components in general, and the ribbon in particular, in what one might call serious, if not even boring, business applications.

There’s still a long road ahead to continue exploring the never-ending depths of what it takes to write elegant and high-performing desktop applications in Swing. If you’re in the business of writing just such apps, I’d love for you to take this second Radiance release for a spin. Click here to get the instructions on how to add Radiance to your Gradle / Maven / Ivy / Leiningen / Bazel builds. And don’t forget that all of the modules require Java 9 to build and run.