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?

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

  • Ken Orr explores an interesting usability side of Swing buttons with popup menus. The solution involves using an unpublished “doNotCancelPopup” client property supported by the current implementation of popup handling in core Swing. This may be different in other JVM implementations, and may even break in the future Swing versions (although the later is quite unlikely). Thanks to this post i have also updated the Flamingo command buttons to dismiss popup menu / panel on the second click. The implementation does not use the above client property, since Flamingo has its own code to manage popups.
  • Gregg Bolinger has kicked off a series of posts on blueprints for well-written Swing applications (part 1, part 2, part 3 so far). Project Maddie has been created to provide the collaboration grounds for interested developers, and it will be interesting to see how this pans out after the initial excitement is gone. I have talked about the lack of Swing blueprints in May 2006 (just after JavaOne 2006), and unfortunately nothing has changed as far as the proper platform documentation goes.
  • Jeremy Wood delves into the intricacies of using existing alpha composites to do cross fades between two translucent images. After finding out that the existing alpha composites are not up to the job, he tries doing direct manipulations on the underlying buffer. As this turns off the hardware acceleration, the time and memory performance were disappointing.
  • Gabriele Carcassi provides a solution for registering JavaScript functions to respond to Swing events on applets.
  • Following his experimentations in the SwingX incubator, Matt Nathan has decided to create a separate project for scalable icons.
  • Geertjan Wielenga writes about the JSyntaxPane project, mentioning the supported editor kits, find / replace dialog, code completion configuration, color styles and more.
  • Gregg Bolinger vents his frustration over the opaque and very slow bug fixing process of core Swing bugs. Working on drag-and-drop between tables and lists, he has hit a bug reported in 2003 and not fixed since then. In the next post he presents (a rather poorly formatted) a solution that he found on JavaRanch came up with.
  • Wolfgang Zitzelsberger has announced release 2.8 of Synthetica look-and-feel. New in this release are the SyntheticaSimple2D theme, improved translucency / border support for comboBox / spinner / text components, transparent window support for 6u10, improved RTL component orientation support.
  • Jean Francois Poilpret has posted the slides to his Jazoon 08 presentation on the JSR 296 (AppFramework).
  • Greg Brown shows two examples of building Pivot applications that are wired with JavaScript and Groovy.
  • Jeremy Wood talks about his implementation of Aqua-like preference panel thats supports both single-row and multi-row layouts, along with cross fading between the components.
  • And finally, Collin Fagan kicks off the new series on exploring layout prototyping. The first part documents his attempts to apply XML to the UI layouts. Layout managers surveyed in this part are absolute, table, grid bag and Mig. It certainly looks like the desktop heavyweights (Adobe and Microsoft) have adopted XML as the lingua franca to enable easier collaboration between designer and developer tools. And while the hardcore developers still prefer writing and tweaking those XML files by hand, both sides of the respective toolchains provide tools that are familiar to the target audience.

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

  • Roman Kennke posts an update on the Java2D stack on VxWorks which is now functional enough to run SwingSet2. The followup post has more screenshots of SwingSet2 running under JamaicaVM and OpenJDK stack.
  • Looks like JavaFX development is going to bring performance improvements back to Java2D and Swing applications. Bug 6766336 aims to use SSE / MMX CPU instructions to speed up the software pipeline – i have mentioned that while the new Direct3D-accelerated pipeline is great for the modern hardware, the “enterprise” desktops usually only have integrated cards. Bug 6766342 aims to improve the (closed-source) Ductus rasterizer on anti-aliased paths, while bugs 6767500, 6767506 and 6767516 aim to improve performance of various primitives on the hardware accelerated pipelines.
  • An interesting bug (6740419) has been opened to provide better control over text grid fitting in Java2D. The subject of printing fidelity has been addressed at length last year by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, and it looks like the designer team behind JavaFX is pushing for Apple-style font rendering in JavaFX. I have already talked about why it is a bad idea, and the introduction of DirectWrite in Windows 7 (more on this in a later post) will obviate the need to invest the precious time in supporting this feature in JavaFX.
  • Jean Francois Poilpret has announced release candidate for release 1.0 of DesignGridLayout.
  • Adam Bien compares Eclipse RCP and NetBeans RCP and leans towards the later in his recommendations. I don’t have any experience with NetBeans RCP, but i’ve been doing heavy Eclipse / SWT work over the last three years at work. I have almost never considered SWT / Eclipse to be more limiting that Swing. In fact, once you understand that it’s better not to fight the platform and instead tweak your design to match the recommended UI guidelines of the platform (re vertical labels in tables), you will find SWT / JFace combination (especially with the Instantiations designer) a very productive and enjoyable environment. Not to mention that you can most certainly create non-Eclipse looking SWT applications, and this is going to be much easier in the near future.
  • Ayman Al-Sairafi has announced release 0.9.3 of the JSyntaxPane component. New in this release – line numbering, reworked Find / Replace dialog and support for Python, C, C++ and Ruby syntax.

Finally, if you are interested in the responses to my posting on the state of core Swing, you’re welcome to read the following:

And Dale Beermann has an interesting series about moving a large Java project to Flash and ActionScript. The first post addresses the reasons why this port has been done, while part 2, part 3 and part 4 (ongoing series) address the specific technical issues in porting Java code to ActionScript.

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