It gives me great pleasure to announce the fourth 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:

Here’s to the next fifteen years!

Radiance comes with a number of sample / demo apps that showcase the flexibility and power of its APIs. One of those demos is Lumen. Its main goal is to highlight the feature set of the Trident animation library. Lumen uses MusicBrainz JSON web service to search for all albums of the specific artist, and for the list of tracks on individual albums. Sending requests and parsing responses is done with Retrofit and Moshi. Lucent is the port of Lumen to Kotlin.

Let’s see how it works together in Kotlin.

We start by adding the build dependencies on Retrofit and Moshi:

dependencies {
    implementation "com.squareup.retrofit2:retrofit:2.9.0"
    implementation "com.squareup.retrofit2:converter-moshi:2.9.0"
}

Next, we define our service interface that maps to MusicBrainz APIs:

    private interface MusicBrainzService {
        @GET("/ws/2/release?type=album&fmt=json")
        fun getReleases(@Query("artist") artistId: String): Call<ReleaseList>

        @GET("/ws/2/release/{release}?inc=recordings&fmt=json")
        fun getRelease(@Path("release") releaseId: String): Call<Release>

        companion object {
            const val API_URL = "https://musicbrainz.org/"
        }
    }

Note the usage of fmt=json attribute in all @GET functions, and usage of @Query and @Path that matches the expected endpoint contracts.

The data classes map to the matching MusicBrainz entities, using @field:Json annotation with the matching name attribute, along with @Json annotation on one of the data classes to properly map it to the matching JSON tags:

data class SearchResultRelease(
        @field:Json(name = "id") val id: String?,
        @field:Json(name = "title") val title: String?,
        @field:Json(name = "artist") var artist: String?,
        @field:Json(name = "date") val date: String?,
        @field:Json(name = "release-events") val releaseEvents: List<ReleaseEvent>,
        @field:Json(name = "asin") val asin: String?)

data class Area(
        @field:Json(name = "disambiguation") val disambiguation: String?,
        @field:Json(name = "id") val id: String?,
        @field:Json(name = "name") var name: String?,
        @field:Json(name = "sort-name") val sortName: String?,
        @field:Json(name = "iso-3166-1-codes") val iso31661Codes: List<String>)

data class Medium(
        @field:Json(name = "tracks") val tracks: List<Track>)

data class Release(
        @field:Json(name = "id") val id: String?,
        @field:Json(name = "title") val title: String?,
        @field:Json(name = "date") val date: String?,
        @field:Json(name = "media") val media: List<Medium>,
        @field:Json(name = "asin") val asin: String?)

data class ReleaseEvent(
        @field:Json(name = "date") val date: String?,
        @field:Json(name = "area") val area: Area?)

@Json(name = "release-list")
data class ReleaseList(
        @field:Json(name = "count") val count: Int?,
        @field:Json(name = "releases") val releases: List<SearchResultRelease>)

data class Track(
        @field:Json(name = "title") val title: String?,
        @field:Json(name = "length") val length: Int?)

Now we can create a Retrofit object and fire off our request:

        val retrofit = Retrofit.Builder()
                .baseUrl(MusicBrainzService.API_URL)
                .client(getHttpClient())
                .addConverterFactory(MoshiConverterFactory.create())
                .build()

        val service = retrofit.create(MusicBrainzService::class.java)

        val releaseResponse = service.getReleases(artistId).execute()
        val releases = releaseResponse.body()

And to get the list of tracks for the specific album:

    fun doTrackSearch(releaseId: String): List<Track> {
        val retrofit = Retrofit.Builder()
                .baseUrl(MusicBrainzService.API_URL)
                .client(getHttpClient())
                .addConverterFactory(MoshiConverterFactory.create())
                .build()

        val service = retrofit.create(MusicBrainzService::class.java)

        val releaseResponse = service.getRelease(releaseId).execute()
        val release = releaseResponse.body()

        return release!!.media[0].tracks
    }

Where the OkHttpClient is configured like this:

    private fun getHttpClient(): OkHttpClient {
        val okHttpBuilder = OkHttpClient.Builder()
        okHttpBuilder.addInterceptor { chain ->
            val requestWithUserAgent = chain.request().newBuilder()
                    .header("User-Agent", "My custom user agent")
                    .build()
            chain.proceed(requestWithUserAgent)
        }
        return okHttpBuilder.build()
    }

This is it. No messy handling of HTTP requests, no manual parsing of JSON responses. All driven by metadata and encapsulated by Kotlin data classes.

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: