In the comment section on the last entry, Viswanath has asked whether the next release of Flamingo is nearing. I do not have definitive answer to this question, as the goal of release 4.0 of Flamingo is to close all the existing functionality gaps. The original internal plan was to allocate 20 weeks for this release cycle, placing the final release at the end of January 2009. For this release i will follow the same cutoff dates as for Substance releases: release candidate two weeks before the final release, and core feature freeze four weeks before the release candidate.

This would currently place the core feature freeze in mid December, and this may prove a little over optimistic. Instead of shrinking the cool-off period between the core feature freeze and release candidate, especially given significant amount of new functionality, the final release may shift a few weeks into February 2009. This should give enough time for both the development of the missing pieces, and community feedback on the new functionality.

On a related note, JIDE has regrettably decided to stop their work on ribbon component. Competition is always good, and not only for the potentials users. Substance has benefitted greatly not only from the prior work (especially Quaqua and Looks), but also from the ongoing development of Nimbus and Synthetica. While i might not have always agreed with the marketing pitches (especially the 56K number for Nimbus which is quite irrelevant since it cannot run outside 6u10), the competition has created a welcome and tangible pressure that ensured continued work on improving and evolving various aspects of Substance.

The latest addition in the Flamingo component suite is support for horizontal scrolling of collapsed ribbon tasks and shrinked task toggle buttons. This has been one of the items on the roadmap for version 4.0 (code named Fainnear), and is now available in the latest 4.0dev drop of Flamingo core and 5.1dev drop of Substance Flamingo plugin.

The new functionality kicks in when you start to shrink the ribbon frame horizontally. At a certain point, the content needs to be either shrinked or scrolled, depending on the minimum size of the corresponding ribbon components and the overall content of the frame. The first screenshot shows three first stages of the ribbon component at progressively smaller widths (all the screenshots in this entry are taken under the Substance Business skin):

The second step shows that the contextual task group header (in the title pane) does not overflow into the bounds of the min / max / close buttons. The third step shows what happens when there is not enough width to show the preferred content of all the task toggle buttons – they begin to shrink (note the last letters that are cut off on some of the buttons), and the area shows horizontal dividers between the buttons.

At a certain point, there is not enough space to show all the task toggle buttons under the minimum width (that is still able to show the first few letters). At this point, the area that hosts the task toggle buttons becomes a scrollable panel:

Clicking on the scroller buttons scrolls the task toggle buttons:

Finally, at some point there is not enough space to show the ribbon bands under the most restrictive resize policy. At that point, the area that hosts the ribbon bands becomes a scrollable panel as well:

As above, clicking the scroller buttons scrolls the ribbon bands:

There are a few usability points built in to this mechanism:

• When the task toggle buttons become shrinked, the left / right insets become gradually smaller to allow showing more text (compare with the first two steps).
• When the task toggle buttons become shrinked, they show the full title in the tooltip.
• You can mouse-wheel the task toggle button area to cycle through the tasks (as before). When you cycle to a task which button is not visible, it will be scrolled to and revealed.
• The content can be scrolled repeatedly by pressing and holding the mouse over a scroller button.
• Once the content reaches the edge, the corresponding button is disabled.

If you want to see the scrolling in action under the core look-and-feels, run the following WebStart demo:

If you want to see this functionality under Substance, run the following WebStart demo:

If you want to test the new functionality in your applications, you would need the following (the last two only for applications running under Substance look-and-feel):

• The latest 4.0dev drop of Flamingo (code-named Fainnear)
• The latest 5.1dev drop of Substance (code-named Panama)
• The latest 5.1dev drop of Substance Flamingo plugin

The latest 4.0dev drop of Flamingo also introduced a breaking API change. The support for help ribbon task has been removed. Instead (as in the screenshots above), you can place a help button on the far right side of the task toggle buttons using the new org.jvnet.flamingo.ribbon.JRibbon.configureHelp API. It gets two parameters – the icon and the action listener that will be invoked when the button is clicked.

Your feedback is, as always, greatly appreciated.

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

• Marc Nuri writes about using bytecode injection (with Javassist) to fix a performance issue in BeansBinding library. In the comment section Laird Nelson point out that this issue has already been fixed in the CVS repository of the project about four months ago.
• Christopher Deckers has announced release 0.9.7 of the DJ Native Swing library. New in this release are XPCOM access for the JWebBrowser when using XULRunner, an additional editor implementation for the JHTMLEditor using TinyMCE and a Syntax Highlighter.
• Gili Tzabari has a useful code snippet for installing Excel-like keyboard navigation on Swing tables.
• Christophe Le Besnerais shares some of his practices writing Swing applications (as a response to Gregg Bolinger‘s quest).
• Karsten Lentzsch shares more information on his implementation of JSR 296 (AppFramework).
• Mikael Grev is back with the first implementation of the media player that uses the new support for translucent and shaped windows in Java 6u10. He has been able to work around the performance limitations by employing a global translucent window that imitates shadows around the main window itself and the slideout shelves. The demo on Windows Vista is quite impressive and responsive, but apparently there is no graceful fallback on desktops that do not support translucency (such as Ubuntu without composite desktop managers).
• Jacek Furmankiewicz writes about BeansBinding and its limitations for working with POJOs.
• Clemens Eisserer has a new Java2D benchmark for testing his XRender pipeline. It is called JGears2 and is available for download and testing.

JavaFX 1.0 is one week away, and the full feature list is still unknown. However, an interesting bug report has found its way to the bug parade (bug 6770914):

http://javaweb.sfbay.sun.com/~ngthomas/javafx/mediaplayer/test.html

This is the javafx media player applet. At the bottom of the applet, there are three buttons, which will trigger a javascript -> fx call:

document.getElementById(“app”).script.playVideo(url);

with will change the video clip playing inside the applet. It works with 6u10, and our latest 6u12 nightly. But with 6u11 b03, document.getElementById(“app”).script is undefined/null

Looks like an applet playing media and being controlled by JavaScript associated with HTML buttons. Is this an example of enhanced applet support? At this point, it will take nothing short of a spectacular collection of applets to make them a viable competitor (and no, dragging the applets to desktop is not going to be it).

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.