Since this is a long weekend in the US I am taking the opportunity to spin out the next quarterly release of Insubstantial, the 6.3 or "Defender" release.
What is Insubstantial?
Insubstantial is a maintenance fork of some of Kirill Grouchnikov's swing based projects. Specifically Substance, Trident, Flamingo, and some supporting project. These are not Kirill's 'official' releases but he has expressed that he is unlikely to do any more official releases.
How do I get it?
The best way is to use them directly from the maven repository (via Gradle, Maven, Ant+Ivy, or other maven repository aware build tool). The group id is com.github.insubstantial. The artifacts are as follows:
- trident [ jar | sources |javadoc ]
- Trident Animation Library.
- laf-plugin [ jar | sources | javadoc ]
- A swing component enhancement framework.
- laf-widget [ jar | sources | javadoc ]
- Swing component enhancements.
- substance [ jar | lite | tools | sources | javadoc ]
- A custom look and feel for Swing.
- flamingo [ jar | sources | javadoc ]
- A Ribbon component and other supporting components.
- substance-flamingo [ jar | sources | javadoc ]
- Substance customizations to some Flamingo components.
- substance-swingx [ jar | sources | javadoc ]
- Substance customizations to some SwingX components.
What's Different?
A full bug list can be found at the github page. Some of the more interesting bugs:
- #18: Trident Animation Threads - If left alone long enough with nothing to do (about 60 seconds) the animation threads will shut down. This will allow for OSGi class unloading.
- #15: Inactive Title Captions - Some Skins now have a different coloring when frames are inactive or not focused.
- #14: Dialog Icons - JDialogs now have title pane icons (and an icon menu).
- #5: JRibbonFrame Captions - When the Quick Action Toolbar and Context Tab Header don't leave enought space, the title caption will move to the right of the context tab header if it helps.
Can I see it do stuff?
Soon. I'll add some demo links once I mess with the GitHub Pages.
What about me?
What about you? Well, being open source patches are always welcome! The code is being hosted at Github so forking, soing your own thing, and posting a pull request should be very easy. There's giant tasks to do, such as updating the look to match Office 2010 and Windows 7. Administrative tasks, such as making the existing web content work on github. And creative tasks, sush as creating new color schemes and skins.
What's on the horizon?
I am bumping the next version number to 7.0 and it's code name is 'Unconquered.' I will track any bugs that make things break in Java 7. Right now I don't know of any breakage (know any? Tell Me). I also plan on looking into supporting some JDK7 features, such as translucent windows (rounded corners anyone?) and re-jiggering some of the jars contents (such as not bundling laf-widget and laf-plugin). I've also seen some early work from Erich Schroeter on a fluent builder for the Ribbon. that should hopefully make it in. The tenative date is early October 2011.
Until later [insert witty postscript here]
Comments (11)
Just converted over to Insubstantial.
Is it me or that SVN images in buttons are now broken? If no one else can get it to work then I'll write up a bug report.
Posted by Zammbi | July 4, 2011 1:40 AM
Posted on July 4, 2011 01:40
Woops I mean SVG, not SVN :P
Posted by zammbi | July 4, 2011 6:35 PM
Posted on July 4, 2011 18:35
Hi Danno!
I've just added Insubstantial to the my Netbeans application. It works but I had to remove from trident-plugin.properties from META-INF of trident-6.3-swing.jar info about other UI toolkits (SWT and Android). I think it would be good to place in the file only info about Swing toolkit. What do you think?
Posted by Michal | July 20, 2011 3:10 PM
Posted on July 20, 2011 15:10
There is a 'swing' classifier for the trident jars that only contains the swing classes (same for SWT and Android, and a base with no specific classes). For 7.0 I plan on re-doing the dependencies and doing stuff like no longer embedding laf-plugin. Please post a issue on github so I don't forget.
Posted by Danno Ferrin | July 21, 2011 1:11 AM
Posted on July 21, 2011 01:11
i'm also Trident's user,
so anyway... keep the good work up, man! :D
Posted by gugum | August 12, 2011 7:50 PM
Posted on August 12, 2011 19:50
hi Danno
i find many bugs in substance, trident, flamingo and i think that i can help u to resolve them. how can i contribute to resolve their bugs? and how can u guide me to do this matter.
Posted by Kamran Smith | August 19, 2011 1:42 PM
Posted on August 19, 2011 13:42
Hi,
Are there any user guides available to any of these libraries?
Posted by tukez | September 10, 2011 2:36 PM
Posted on September 10, 2011 14:36
So, I'd like to submit a patch for the next release, but I can't get Gradle to work with Eclipse and everything on the Web is just shy of useful. I know Maven, but not Gradle. How do I get this to work?
Posted by Karl | September 12, 2011 1:26 PM
Posted on September 12, 2011 13:26
What can I say... YOU ARE THE GREATEST!
I'm very happy you forked Kirill's job and are actively mantaining it. Thank you for the effort.
I believe these libraries have lots of potential... Worthy of Apache Commons!
Keep up the excellent work!
Posted by Umberto | September 30, 2011 2:23 PM
Posted on September 30, 2011 14:23
Nice work. Office 2010 theme would be great. Have you heard about fxg converter? It might be useful.
Posted by Stan Svec | October 16, 2011 6:55 AM
Posted on October 16, 2011 06:55
Hi Denno, i'm glad to see that you are developing our favourite swing framework. You wrote, that your targeted release date for 7.0 is october - can you give an update of this information please?
Will the Flamingo stuff you wrote about be in the release?
Thanks & best regards
David
Posted by David | November 2, 2011 3:12 AM
Posted on November 2, 2011 03:12