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blogs > andrew > software > java-gnome > java-gnome-4.0.5-release
Mon, 26 Nov 2007
java-gnome 4.0.5 released!
This blog post is the release note from the NEWS file which you can read
online … or in the
sources,
of course!
java-gnome 4.0.5 (26 Nov 2007)
TreeView is here!
It’s always a great feeling when you bag a milestone, and with this release we have reached a major goal on our way to having outstanding Java bindings for the GNOME platform: coverage of GTK’s powerful yet complex TreeView & TreeModel API.
TreeView
TreeViews are a central part of almost every application. GUIs use lists for all sorts of things, and so a significant goal was to make coding TreeViews and their backing TreeModels as straight forward as possible.
The most challenging and complex part was to design the Java side API, which was no small matter. As a native library, the GtkTreeView API is complex and very much written with programming in the C language in mind, and as such our algorithmic mapping of the underlying libraries into Java doesn’t entirely fit. Long experience with the TreeViews in the previous bindings had made it clear just how nasty to use the API could be, and so the hardest part of the work was to come up with a mapping and a usage pattern that would be both faithful to GTK and be sensible to use.
The other significant challenge was to document the work effectively. Our Java side API documentation is a major feature of java-gnome, and merely exposing classes and methods is not sufficient; they need to be clearly explained in our JavaDoc as well.
along with numerous test cases in our unit test suite, and several comprehensively worked examples.
This was a monster patch, and the culmination of not just three months direct effort, but also where we’ve been heading since we first started the re-engineering of Java bindings for GNOME. Although largely written by Andrew Cowie, a significant contribution was made by Srichand Pendyala who not only exhaustively evaluated the design but also threw in some serious chunks of code. The work benefited from comprehensive input from Peter Miller on the modelling and design, and the comments of Bryan Clark, Owen Taylor, and Hanna Wallach were all really positive and helped us know that we’d gone in the right direction. Finally, thanks to Behdad Esfahbod and the GNOME Foundation who made it possible for us to meet in Boston at the GNOME Summit and so accomplish much of the final pulling together of this branch.
Continuing Improvement
Meanwhile, steady work continues on to the fundamental base classes, with a whack of additional signals and methods on Widget and especially Window, along with expansion of coverage in numerous other classes.
We’ve begun to get the basics of image handling in place,
One nice piece of contributed work came from Vreixo Formoso and Thomas Schmitz
with coverage of the Dialog Window functionality in GTK. It took a bit of
doing to map the int response codes used by GTK into something suitably
strongly-typed, but all good.
Finally, minor improvements to all sorts of stuff, notably from new contributor Mario Torre. Awesome!
For further details you can always grab a copy of the sources and run
$ bzr diff -r tag:v4.0.4..tag:v4.0.5
to see the complete code delta.
Screenshots
For fun we built in a capability to
create demonstrations to be captured as screenshots to illustrate various
things. It doesn’t get more basic than the example on the
Window documentation page, but it’s a nice touch. :) We’ve
screenshots for a number of Dialog classes and one for the TreeView page. I
imagine we’ll build up a nice library of images in the next few months (yes,
dear contributors, you can add snapshots to the list of things we’ll be
expecting along with well written documentation and unit tests when submitting
additions to the public API).
Building and requirements
The library now depends on GTK >= 2.12. Those packaging java-gnome for their distributions please take note.
Looking ahead
Continuing to expand the coverage levels in the classes already exposed will continue to dominate our attention; there’s still a long way to go but we’re pleased with the progress we’ve made so far; you can definitely build real applications with java-gnome now.
The next release also ought to include preliminary coverage of GConf and Cairo. Doing each justice will again take a serious amount of work, but will continue to grow the fun things you can do with java-gnome.
You can download java-gnome from ftp.gnome.org or easily checkout a branch from mainline using Bazaar:
$ bzr clone bzr://research.operationaldynamics.com/bzr/java-gnome/mainline java-gnome
This release marks a particularly satisfying milestone for me. I have three+ years of work that’s been waiting to be ported to java-gnome 4.0, but I’ve needed a new TreeView binding in place before I could do so. So this is a big deal for me. At last I can start thinking about getting back to actually hacking on the applications I actually want to be working on, and not spending so much of time on the underlying bindings themselves. There’s still a lot that needs doing on java-gnome, but it’s getting closer.
AfC
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