Celebrating 20 years with Radiance 8.0.0
It started back in early 2005 with an idea to recreate the visuals of macOS Aqua buttons in Java2D
and quickly grew to cover a wider range of Swing components under the umbrella of Substance look-and-feel, on the now discontinued java.net. The name came from trying to capture the spirit of Aqua visuals grounded in physicality of material, texture and lighting. The first commit was on April 15, 2005, and the first release of Substance was on May 30, 2005.
A few months later in September 2005, I started working on Flamingo as a proof-of-concept to implement the overall ribbon structure as a Swing component. Later in 2009, common animation APIs were extracted from Substance and made into the Trident animation library, hosted on the now as well discontinued kenai.com.
After taking a break from these libraries in 2010 (during that period the various libraries were forked under the Insubstantial umbrella between 2011 and 2013), I came back to working on them in late 2016, adding support for high DPI displays and reducing visual noise across all components. A couple years later in mid 2018 all the separate projects were brought under the unified Radiance umbrella brand, switching to the industry standard Gradle build system, publishing Maven artifacts for all the libraries, and adding Kotlin DSL extensions.
And now, twenty years after that very first public Substance release, the next major milestone of the Radiance libraries is here. Radiance 8, code-named Marble, brings the biggest rewrite in the project history so far – a new color system. Code-named Project Chroma, it spanned about 700 commits and touched around 27K lines of code:
Radiance 8 uses the Chroma color system from the Ephemeral design library, which builds on the core foundations of the Material color utilities. Over the next few weeks I’ll write more about what Chroma is, and the new capabilities it unlocks for Swing developers that use Radiance as their look-and-feel. In the meanwhile, as always, I’ll list the changes and fixes that went into Radiance 8, using emojis to mark different parts of it:
💔 marks an incompatible API / binary change
🎁 marks new features
🔧 marks bug fixes and general improvements
A new color system
Project Chroma – adding color palettes in Radiance
- Color tokens
- Color token association kinds
- Color tokens bundles
- Dependency on Ephemeral Chroma library
- The migration guide covers all the 💔 breaking API changes in
RadianceSkin,RadianceThemingSlices, painters and more
Theming
- 🔧 Use “Minimize” rather than “Iconify” terminology for window-level actions
- 🔧 Fix application window jumps when moving between displays
- 🔧 Fix exception in setting fonts for
JTreecomponents - 🔧 Consistent handling of selection highlights of disabled renderer-based components (lists, tables, trees)
- 🔧 Always show scroll thumb for scrollable content
- 🔧 Fix issues with slider track and thumb during printing
- 🔧 Fix visuals of internal frame header areas under skins that use matte decoration painter
Component
- 🎁 Update flow ribbon bands to accept a
BaseProjectionas components - 🔧 Fix user interaction with comboboxes in minimized ribbon content
- 🔧 Fix application of icon filter strategies to ribbon application menu commands
- 🔧 Fix passing command overlays to secondary menu commands
- 🔧 Fix crash when some ribbon bands start in collapsed state
- 🔧 Fix active rollover / pressed state visuals for disabled command buttons
- 🔧 Fix command buttons to be updated when secondary content model is updated
- 🔧 Fix display of key tips in collapsed ribbon bands hosted in popups
The new color system in Radiance unlocks a lot of things that we’ve seen in modern desktop, web and mobile interfaces in the last few years. If you’re in the business of writing elegant and high-performing desktop applications in Swing, I’d love for you to take this Radiance release for a spin. Click here to get the instructions on how to add Radiance to your builds. And don’t forget that all of the modules require Java 9 to build and run.
