There’s nothing like the right link at the right time. Remy Rakic (Twitter alias lqd) has left a link to the apparent release jars of JavaFX Desktop 1.0 in the comments on the previous entry. So i’ve decided to see whether there is anything new in the JMC department since the last time i’ve looked at it.

In the JavaFX preview, the native code was shipped directly in the jmc.dll. The download folder has the native libraries available in three platform-specific jar files (one for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux each). For Windows, the jar contains four DLLs:

  • jmc.dll as before
  • on2_decoder.dll which would be presumably responsible for the new licensed decoders
  • msvcp71.dll and msvcr71.dll which are parts of Visual C++ 7.1

Assuming that this download folder is going to be used as a centralized WebStart repository, i would venture to say that there is going to be some kind of built-in mechanism for extracting these DLLs at runtime and updating the java library path. However, in my experiments i had to extract them manually and point the -Djava.library.path to the folder that contains those DLLs. We’ll wait and see whether the final (and official) release will follow in the footsteps of SWT 3.3 that handles the locally run extraction automatically.

Apart from the new JMediaView class that is a lightweight Swing component I haven’t seen any new classes. However, this JMC drop can play all QuickTime content from the sample page, including H.264, MPEG-4, 3GPP and MPEG-2, as well as the full scale trailers from the Apple site (in H.264 format). The playback support goes a long way towards my number one wish for desktop Java in 2008, and it will be hopefully followed by the recording capabilities as well.

I’ve decided to dive a little bit deeper into the JMC internals and updated the JMCFrame class to show a skeleton implementation of a “home-grown” player. Instead of using ready-made classes such as JMediaPlayer, JMediaPane or JMediaView, i’m creating a MediaProvider from the specific URI and attaching a VideoRendererListener to its VideoRenderControl (i would guess that the JMedia* classes follow the same route, but without the source code it’s hard to tell). This certainly makes the code a little bit more complicated, but allows much greater flexibility as far as compositing and overlaying go. Here is a screenshot of the player in action:

What do you see in the screenshot? There is a JPanel with a JButton control in it. The JPanel overrides the paintComponent and paints the following three layers:

  • Gradient checkered background.
  • The contents of the current video frame with 80% opacity.
  • Information on the current media location, total duration and rate.

Using a MediaProvider with a VideoRendererListener allows some interesting things – overlaying translucent controls and HUDs, cross fading between multiple video streams and rendering video streams on arbitrary Swing components.

The new implementation supports dropping two kinds of video content:

  • Local file
  • URL

If you run the sample code locally, drag a local video file on the panel and press the play button. The content should start playing. You can also drag a URL from your favourite browser. If that URL points to a video stream, the stream will be played – tested on streaming H.264 movie trailers from the Apple site :)

If i had to choose a particularly nifty API, that would be the MediaControl in the com.sun.media.jmc.control package. To get the specific control, call MediaProvider.getControl passing the class instance of the required control (such as VideoRenderControl). The MediaProvider.getControls API will enumerate the supported controls. Here is what i see on my machine when playing video files: play, audio, video, subtitle, video render and track. Hopefully we are going to see the record control joining this group soon.

Here are some Swing links that you might have missed during the last week:

In three days, JavaFX Desktop 1.0 will be officially released. I have been skeptical about JavaFX over the last few months, and while this may be attributed to general inclination of programmers towards being “entrenched” in the technologies that they know, there are other reasons as well. Aside from a few unnamed technology partners that were participating in shaping the capabilities of this release, the community has been effectively shut from lending its hand in commenting, testing and evolving the platform. We have long heard about “being blown away” by the new functionality being brought by JavaFX to the RIA market, and this week we will finally see if it is going to live up to the marketing hype.

Personally, i will be very glad to see at least one out of the following ten items being available for JavaFX, as well as cross-platform Swing applications come December 4:

  1. 6u10 / 6u11 for Apple – [update] see bug 6761033 for some interesting news.
  2. Full java lightweight rendering of SWF files even without installed Flash engine
  3. Full java lightweight rendering of H.264 files even without installed codecs
  4. Adaptive video streaming based on the client CPU and network utilization
  5. Video capture and creation
  6. Fully skinnable lightweight browser component based on WebKit or Mozilla / Gecko
  7. Inclusion of form-oriented layout manager
  8. Support for high level shader language (HLSL) for hardware accelerated custom effects
  9. Nimbus designer
  10. JavaFX.com with JavaFX-only applet driven content

And is it me, or are we going to see Sun ditching its own module initiative and move towards restructuring JDK as a collection of OSGI bundles?

The latest addition in the Flamingo component suite is support for minimizing the ribbon. This has been one of the items on the roadmap for version 4.0 (code named Fainnear), and is now available in the latest 4.0dev drop of Flamingo core and 5.1dev drop of Substance Flamingo plugin.

There are three ways to minimize and un-minimize the ribbon:

  • Application code can use the new JRibbon.setMinimized API
  • User double-clicking a task toggle button
  • User pressing Ctrl+F1 key stroke

Here is a screenshot of a ribbon when it is not minimized:

When the ribbon is minimized in one of the three ways mentioned above, only the task bar and the task toggle button bar are shown. The ribbon bands of the currently selected ribbon task are hidden. Note how the main content of the frame (delineated with the Word-style ruler bands) gets expanded to occupy the area of the ribbon bands:

When a task toggle button is single-clicked, the ribbon bands of the clicked task are shown in a popup overlay without shifting the main content area down:

The ribbon tasks in the popup overlay have the same cascading popup support as the usual (non-minimized) ribbon tasks. Here is a extended popup menu of a Popup button from the first ribbon task:

If you want to see the scrolling in action under the core look-and-feels, run the following WebStart demo:

If you want to see this functionality under Substance, run the following WebStart demo:

If you want to test the new functionality in your applications, you would need the following (the last two only for applications running under Substance look-and-feel):

Your feedback is, as always, greatly appreciated.

As the name of this very blog implies, perhaps the most enjoyable part of my work on Substance and Flamingo is polishing the visuals of the different controls. And while the main emphasis of release 4.0 of Flamingo (code-named Fainnear) is to close the existing functional gaps, this will most certainly not come at the expense of the visuals.

First, here is a screenshot of an enhanced popup menu under Nimbus look-and-feel before:

And here are the new visuals:

In this specific example, the differences are somewhat unnoticeable. You can see that the insets of Format button and Apply Styles menu item are a little bigger, and that the ribbon gallery buttons (up / down / expand) are more consistent with the standalone buttons and have only one-pixel separator line between them.

This polishing is much more noticeable on command button strips, especially under look-and-feels that have non-zero padding around them (such as Nimbus). Let’s start with the Windows look-and-feel under Vista. This is before:

and this is after:

This is the same command buttons strips under Nimbus before:

and after:

And finally, the same command button strips under Synthetica Blue Steel before:

and after:

The new visuals also apply to vertical command button strips. A core example can be found in the ribbon galleries that show the up / down / expand strip on the right hand side. Here is how it now looks under Nimbus:

and Synthetica Blue Steel:

Applications that wish to use the “segmented” appearance for command buttons outside the command button strips (akin to the “JButton.segmentPosition” client property supported by Aqua look-and-feel) can use the new AbstractCommandButton.setLocationOrderKind API. When you’re placing buttons inside a command button strip component, there’s no need to use this API explicitly.

Finally, the latest 4.0dev drop provides even more control over scaling the inner layout gaps of command buttons. The new setHGapScaleFactor and setVGapScaleFactor APIs on the AbstractCommandButton and JCommandButtonStrip classes allow applications to fine tune the “density” of command buttons. This is especially relevant for command button strips.

By default, buttons in horizontal command button strips use hGapScaleFactor of 0.75, and the buttons in vertical command button strips use vGapScaleFactor of 0.75. This makes the “kerning” between the adjacent buttons 25% smaller, accounting for gaps on both sides of the inter-button separators.

The following screenshot illustrates the horizontal and vertical gap scale factors on two different command button strips under Nimbus look-and-feel:

The top three rows have the same vertical gap scaling, but the horizontal gap scaling is different. The bottom three rows have the same horizontal gap scaling, but the vertical gap scaling is different. The gap scaling is supported on vertical command button strips as well:

And finally, Substance plugin for Flamingo supports the new functionality as well. Here are the horizontal button strips under Substance Business skin:

and the vertical button strips:

Here, you would notice that in addition to one-pixel separator between the adjacent buttons (that was already present), there are also inner one-pixel lighter contours on both sides of the separator.

If you want to test the new functionality in your applications, you would need the following (the last two only for applications running under Substance look-and-feel):

Your feedback is, as always, greatly appreciated.

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