Radiance 2.5.0

September 3rd, 2019

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:

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

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

Trident

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

Photon

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.

Radiance 2.0.1

March 11th, 2019

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:

💔 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.

Radiance 1.0.0

October 5th, 2018

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.

There’s a bunch of helper extension methods that the Kotlin standard library provides for working with collections. However, it would seem that at the present moment <a href="https://kotlinlang.org/api/latest/jvm/stdlib/kotlin.collections/java.util.-enumeration/index.html">java.util.Enumeration</a> has been left a bit behind. Here is a simple extension method to convert any List to a matching Enumeration:


/**
 * Extension function for converting a {@link List} to an {@link Enumeration}
 */
fun <T> List<T>.toEnumeration(): Enumeration<T> {
    return object : Enumeration<T> {
        var count = 0

        override fun hasMoreElements(): Boolean {
            return this.count < size
        }

        override fun nextElement(): T {
            if (this.count < size) {
                return get(this.count++)
            }
            throw NoSuchElementException("List enumeration asked for more elements than present")
        }
    }
}

And here is how you can use it to expose the local file system to the JTree component. First, we create a custom implementation of the TreeNode interface:


data class FileTreeNode(val file: File?, val children: Array<File>, val nodeParent: TreeNode?) : TreeNode {
    constructor(file: File, parent: TreeNode) : this(file, file.listFiles() ?: arrayOf(), parent)
    constructor(children: Array<File>) : this(null, children, null)

    init {
        children.sortWith(compareBy { it.name.toLowerCase() })
    }

    override fun children(): Enumeration<FileTreeNode> {
        return children.map { FileTreeNode(it, this) }.toEnumeration()
    }

    override fun getAllowsChildren(): Boolean {
        return true
    }

    override fun getChildAt(childIndex: Int): TreeNode {
        return FileTreeNode(children[childIndex], this)
    }

    override fun getChildCount(): Int {
        return children.size
    }

    override fun getIndex(node: TreeNode): Int {
        val ftn = node as FileTreeNode
        return children.indexOfFirst { it == ftn.file }
    }

    override fun getParent(): TreeNode? {
        return this.nodeParent
    }

    override fun isLeaf(): Boolean {
        val isNotFolder = (this.file != null) && (this.file.isFile)
        return this.childCount == 0 && isNotFolder
    }
}

Note a few language shortcuts that make the code more concise than its Java counterparts:

  • Since File.listFiles() can return null, we wrap that call with a simple Elvis operator: file.listFiles() ?: arrayOf().
  • The initializer block sorts the File children in place by name.
  • To return tree node enumeration in children(), we first map each File child to the corresponding FileTreeNode and then use our extension function to convert the resulting List to Enumeration.
  • Looking up the index of the specific node is done with the existing extension indexOfFirst function from the standard library.

Now all is left to do is to create our JTree:


val tree = JTree(FileTreeNode(File.listRoots()))
tree.rootVisible = false