News from the Software Smithy

SoftSmithy news: I recently released a new version of the SoftSmithy Utility Library and the SoftSmithy Development Utility Library.

In addition to the library updates, a lot of migration work has been done:

• Project migration: Ant -> Maven
  
• Project migration: Subversion -> Mercurial
  
• License upgraded: SPL -> CDDL
  
• Project versioning aligned with Maven versioning, starting with v0.1
• Project layout restructured

For easier version management I aligned the version of the SoftSmithy Development Utility Library with the version of the SoftSmithy Utility Library. As the SoftSmithy Development Utility Library has a dependency to the SoftSmithy Utility Library it's recommended to use the same version of both libraries until the APIs are stable!

I added new utility methods, classes and framework updates for locale-sensitive sorting, object matching, Swing JTable row headers, streams, lists, unit tests and more.

You can download the archives (including the jars, documentation, samples etc.) and read more about the changes here:
SoftSmithy Utility Library v0.1 (online documenation)
SoftSmithy Development Utility Library v0.1 (online documentation)

Since the project is now built with Maven, I deployed the artifacts (including source and javadoc artifacts) to Maven Central. You can use the following dependencies:

For the SoftSmithy Utility Library:
<br /> <dependency><br /> <groupid>org.softsmithy.lib</groupid><br /> <artifactid>lib-core</artifactid><br /> <version>0.1</version><br /> </dependency><br />

For the SoftSmithy Development Utility Library (usually with scope = test):
<br /> <dependency><br /> <groupid>org.softsmithy.devlib</groupid><br /> <artifactid>devlib-core</artifactid><br /> <version>0.1</version><br /> <scope>test</scope><br /> </dependency><br />

YANPA: Remote EJB Monitoring Application on the NetBeans Platform

Geertjan Wielenga, an Oracle/ Sun employee and a technical writer of the NetBeans team, blogged in his YANPA (Yet Another NetBeans Platform Application) series about a pilot project of one of my customers where I could introduced the NetBeans Platform. You can read more about it here.

News - Swing-Generics (OpenJDK): JList patch commited

Great news from the OpenJDK swing-generics project: my patch to "generify" JList, along with AbstractListModel, DefaultListCellRenderer, DefaultListModel, ListCellRenderer and ListModel, has been commited to the OpenJDK/ Swing repository!

This patch helps writing more stable code.

Eg. instead of writing something like:
<br />DefaultListModel model = new DefaultListModel();<br />model.addElement("test");<br />JList list = new JList(model);<br />...<br />String value = (String) list.getSelectedValue(); // unchecked cast<br />Foo foo = (Foo) list.getSelectedValue(); // cast will fail at runtime<br />

with this patch you can write now:
<br />DefaultListModel<String> model = new DefaultListModel<String>();<br />model.addElement("test");<br />JList<String> list = new JList<String>(model);<br />...<br />String value = list.getSelectedValue();<br />Foo foo = list.getSelectedValue(); // compile time error<br />

Note that:
JList.getSelectedValues(): Object[] has been deprecated and replaced with:
JList.getSelectedValuesList(): List<E>

Have a look at the jtreg tests to see more examples.

If you're interested in the future of Swing, join the discussions in the OpenJDK Swing mailing list.