It gives me great pleasure to announce the third major release of Radiance. Let’s get to what’s been fixed, and what’s been added. First, I’m going to use emojis to mark different parts of it like this:

Substance

• 😻 New skins – Nebula Amethyst, Night Shade and Graphite Sunset
• 🤷‍♀️ Fix for disappearing internal frame title pane buttons
• 🤷‍♀️ Fix for crash during initialization
• 🤷‍♀️ Fix for OutOfMemoryError on sliders with large model ranges
• 🤷‍♀️ Fix for slider tracks under dark skins
• 💔 Fix for incorrect tracking of state-based alpha values in color scheme bundles
• 🤷‍♀️ Fix for drop shadows under some skins
• 🤷‍♀️ Fix for contrast ratio of highlighted content under Sahara skin
• 🤷‍♀️ Fix for antialiased rendering of pasted text content

Flamingo

• 😻 Keyboard traversal of ribbon content
• 😻 Keyboard traversal of command button popups
• 🤷‍♀️ Command button popups can now be dismissed without activating any action

Trident

• 😻 DSL for Trident
• 🤷‍♀️ Fix for combining looping timelines with .fromCurrent()

Photon

• 😻 Extended transcoding support for <image>, <marker>, <pattern> and <text> elements

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. The second Radiance release was about making them work much better together. And this one (code-named Coral) is about covering major functionality gaps that were missing up until now.

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 third 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.

It gives me great pleasure to announce the second major release of Radiance. It was all ready to go as 2.0.0, but what’s a release really if a blocker bug doesn’t make it in? So instead, you get to get 2.0.1 for now – pending any other blockers that would require a couple more minor re-spins. Anyway, let’s get to what’s new. First, I’m going to use emojis to mark different parts of it like this:

It’s been a few busy months since the announcement of Project Radiance, the new umbrella brand that unifies and streamlines the way Swing developers can integrate my libraries into their projects. Some of those projects have started all the way back in 2005, and some have joined later on along the road. Over the years, they’ve been hosted on three sites (java.net, kenai.com and github.com) in three version control systems (cvs, svn, git). Approaching the 15th year mark (with a hiatus along the way), it was clear that time has come to revisit the fundamental structure of these projects and bring them into a more modern world.

At a high-level:

• Radiance is a single project that provides a Gradle-based build that no longer relies on knowing exactly what to check out and where the dependent projects need to be located. It also uses proper third-party project dependencies to pull those at build time.
• Starting from the very first release, Radiance provides Maven artifacts for all core libraries – Trident (animation), Substance (look-and-feel), Flamingo (components), Photon (SVG icons) and others.
• The Kormorant sub-project is the first exploration into using Kotlin DSLs (domain-specific languages) for more declarative way of working with Swing UIs.
• Flamingo components only support Substance look-and-feel, no longer doing awkward and unnecessary tricks to try and support core and other third-party look-and-feels.

It gives me great pleasure to announce the very first release of Radiance, appropriately tagged 1.0.0 and code-named Antimony. Lines of code is about as meaningless a metric as it goes in our part of the world, but there are a lot of lines in Radiance. Ignoring the transcoded SVG files auto-generated by Photon, Radiance has around 208K lines of Java code, 7K lines of Kotlin code and 5K lines of build scripts.

It’s been a long road to get to where Radiance is today. And there’s 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 very first Radiance release for a spin. You’ll find the prebuilt dependencies in the /drop/1.0.0 folder, and if you fancy a more proper dependency management mechanism, there’s an answer for that as well . All of them require Java 8 to build and run.

This week marks the beginning of a new phase for a bunch of my long-running open-source Swing projects. Some of them have started all the way back in 2005, and some have joined later on along the road. Over the years, they’ve been hosted on three sites (java.net, kenai.com and github.com) in three version control systems (cvs, svn, git). Approaching the 15th year mark (with a hiatus along the way), it’s clear that it’s time to revisit the fundamental structure of these projects and bring them into a more modern world.

Since these projects have been brought back to life in the last two years, the entire codebase has been revisited to clean up the cruft that has accumulated over time. Some of the explorations that I’ve embarked on have not went as well as I hoped they would be. That has been the fate of laf-plugin and laf-widget projects that aimed to bring common functionality across a variety of third-party look-and-feels, a field that is only seeing Substance and Synthetica as the two lone survivors.

Today I’m happy to announce the beginning of Project Radiance, the new umbrella brand that will unify and streamline the way Swing developers can integrate my libraries into their projects. At a high-level:

• Radiance is a single project that provides a Gradle-based build that no longer relies on knowing exactly what to check out and where the dependent projects need to be located. It also uses proper third-party project dependencies to pull those at build time.
• Starting from the very first release (planned for second half of 2018), Radiance will provide Maven artifacts for all core libraries – Trident (animation), Substance (look-and-feel), Flamingo (components), Ibis (SVG icons) and others.
• The Kormorant sub-project is the first exploration into using Kotlin DSLs (domain-specific languages) for more declarative way of working with Swing UIs.
• Flamingo components will only support Substance look-and-feel, no longer doing awkward and unnecessary tricks to try and support core and other third-party look-and-feels.

All the open bugs on existing GitHub projects have been migrated to be under Radiance. Once the migration of all the relevant documentation and older binaries to Radiance is complete in the next couple of weeks, those projects will be deleted from GitHub.

Starting from today, all new development such as bug fixes, feature work and documentation updates will only be done under Radiance. The versioning of all the projects will be unified going forward, resetting to 1.0. Some public APIs might move between sub-projects (going into Neon).