Today I will do some code analysis on JIDE jars using Classycle (http://classycle.sourceforge.net/) and JIDE TreeMap. See below. Click on it to see a larger picture.

Some interesting facts:
1. The largest class is DefaultDockingManager (which is the largest individual rectangle)
2. The largest package is com.jidesoft.grid (which is the first/largest block)
3. The most used class (inside JIDE classes) is JideSwingUtilities, not surprise as it is a collection of many useful static methods. You can tell by the darkness of its red color
4. Top five packages are com.jidesoft.grid, com.jidesoft.plaf, com.jidesoft.chart, com.jidesoft.swing and com.jidesoft.combobox (the first five blocks).
5. The largest product is JIDE Grids. It’s com.jidesoft.grid is already the largest by itself but JIDE Grids is much bigger as it spans several packages – com.jidesoft.grid, com.jidesoft.combobox, com.jidesoft.list, com.jidesoft.filter, etc.

As you can see, it is much easier than looking into a table to dig out these facts. I used the class size as the size measurement when drawing the treemap. That’s why most of the facts are related to the size. You can use other values to find out other interesting facts.

Take a look at some large tables in your application. Maybe you can use the treemap to visualize them too.

Here is the link to the treemap product page (http://www.jidesoft.com/products/treemap.htm). You can also run our webstart demo to see some treemaps in action here.

The CellStyle feature in JIDE Grids provides a hook into the cell renderer creation process. You use CellStyle to pass in some predefined styles, such as font, font style, background, foreground, border, alignments. If you are using a CellStyleTable or one of its subclasses, those styles will be applied to the renderer component before it is used to paint the cell. The DefaultTableCellRenderer is a JLabel. As long as you are okay to use JLabel to renderer the cell, the cell styles feature would work so that you don’t have to introduce customized cell renderers.

There are cases that JLabel can’t handle the painting of the cells. For example, a cell that renders a five-star rating. Clearly JLabel can’t handle it. And it sounds like for sure that you will have to create a customized renderer based on a five-star rating component. But we have another way to do it. Always keep in mind, JTable uses the renderer component to paint the cell. If we can find a way to use our own code to do the painting, we may not need a new cell renderer after all. That’s why we decide to bring the CellStyle feature to the next level by introducing CellPainter.

CellPainter is a simple interface like this.

We introduced two types of CellPainters to the CellStyleTable. One is the OverlayCellPainter, the other is the UnderlayCellPainter. We paint the cell in three steps. First, the lower layer, which is painted before the cell content, paints using the underlay CellPainter specified in the CellStyle. The second step is the to paint the cell content using the renderer component, as the table does right now. The last step is to paint using the overlay CellPainter after the cell content is painted. By leveraging this three-step painting, we make a lot of features possible.

The demo below shows both cell painters. The underlay painter is used for the “Last” column. It paints a gradient bar based on the value. The length of the bar matches the value. The color of bar is also changed based on the range of the value. You can paint the five-star rating using this painter too.

The overlay painter can be used to paint something that is over the cell value, i.e., to indicate the value is abnormal, invalid, or should be emphasized etc. You can see the column “Volume” having such an overlay painter where we randomly paint an icon for some cells as an overlay. In the JIDE Common Layer, we have Overlay component which can place an overlay component over another component. It is perfect for JTextField, JComboBox etc. small component to show a validation error. However it is so useful in the case of JTable cells. The CellStyle overlay painter feature is here to fill in the gap. You can now easily display validation errors using this new feature.

The first one is the Searchable feature (type and search in a list or a tree or a table), an idea that we shamelessly copied (and enhanced), and several years ago made part of the open source JIDE Common Layer. See below.

The second feature is where tree nodes or list rows expand to a tool-tip when the text is wider than the scroll pane. We finally implemented this feature by leveraging some source code from the IDEA community edition which was open sourced under Apache license. We implemented TreeExpandedTip, ListExpandedTip and TableExpandedTip to support JTree, JList and JTable respectively. In order to make this feature easier to use, we completely changed the API and also enhanced it so that it can handle any component inside a JScrollPane. In the new ExpandedTipDemo, you will find a demo to show a whole image as an expanded tip.

The newsletter stops right here. But I would like to discuss in a little more detail.

Why the expanded tip feature is important?

I love IntelliJ IDEA. If there weren’t IDEA, I probably won’t be here making JIDE components. I am not kidding. I still remembered how happy I was when someone referred it to me back in 2001. Half an year later, I found JIDE using IDEA as my only Java IDE. Sometimes I asked me why I love IntelliJ IDEA so much. One of the reasons is probably IDEA’s usability is great, much better than that of NB or Eclipse. The two features I mentioned above are such examples.

Does your application have a JList or JTree that have many rows (say more than 20) but you didn’t bother in implementing the Searchable feature? If the answer is yes, it means you didn’t put in enough attention to your application’s usability. Your users will suffer from your ignorance as they will have to scroll up and down in tons of items to find the item they are looking for.

The same argument is there for the expanded tip. When a user can’t see the whole node, he/she has to move the mouse all the way to the bottom horizontal scroll bar, drag it to see the rest of the content, and probably need to drag back again in order to expand/collapse the tree node. The trouble could easily be avoid by using the expanded tip feature. Your users will surely appreciate if you can pay attention to those usability details.

The action item for you today is to find all your JList, JTree and JTable in your application and install the ExpanedTip. Just one line: ExpandedTipUtils.install(a JList/JTree/JTable). Let’s see how your user will love it.

What’s next?

I think the feature is fully implemented for the JList and JTree. However it is still half done for the JTable. There are two parts to show clipped content in a JTable – the cell level and the row level. As you can see in the screenshot above, we implemented at the row level. User still can’t see the full content of the cell (such as AMER INTL…). Our suggestion right now is to show the full content of the cell using a regular tooltip. It can done by setting the tooltip for the cell renderer component. See below. However I still hope we could implement the expanded tip to cover the extra effort.

Note: The ExpandedTip is available since JIDE 3.3.0 release. It is part of the JIDE Components product. You can a webstart demo at here to see it in action.

We will call this project JideFx as I announced one year ago on JavaOne2010. The binary jar is at http://www.jidesoft.com/jidefx/downloads/jidefx-0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar. Before we decide the licensing terms for it, it is free to use without any obligation.

Here is how you use it.

RangeSlider rangeSlider = new RangeSlider(0, 100, 10, 90);
rangeSlider.setStyle("-fx-skin: \"com.jidefx.scene.control.skin.RangeSliderSkin\"");

All three examples are very common in a real application.

1. The first one is to show a ™ trademark sign next to Java. It is the same thing for a ® (registered trademark) sign.
2. The second one is a math formula.
3. The third one indicates the text has an error.

We want to use both the red color and a waved underline to indicate the error. Keep in mind, from accessibility point of view, only the red color is not enough because of color blindness.

Please continue reading the rest of the article at http://www.jidesoft.com/articles/StyledLabel.pdf.

The Merging Point of Android and Swing (PowerPoint)

The Merging Point of Android and Swing (PDF)

But without the indexing, what if I want to locate  a file? Get this “everything” from http://www.voidtools.com/. Merely 340k download size, totally amazing. It took just 3 minutes to index my whole disk and after that the search for a file name is instant

Along the line of Apple, I had a very bad experience with Apple technical support in the last few days. While I was enjoying the new MacBook Pro and said all kinds of good things about Apple during JavaOne, one problem was bothering me. I had to use Vista through boot camp on this laptop once in a while since some software applications only run on Vista. However the Vista keeps freezing randomly. After it is frozen, there is nothing you can do except doing a hard reboot. It happens several times a day and there is no clue when it will happen or which application caused it.

After a brief google, I gave up so I called Apple technical support. Their answer was simply “contract Microsoft”. From years of experience, I knew it was not an issue with Vista. It is either hardware issue (memory especially) or a hardware driver issue. Since all hardware drivers I am using are from a CD included in the MBP box so I claimed to the support ladies that Apple should provide support for it, not Microsoft. I called three times in two days. One lady simply hang up on me. The last lady directs me to a so-called Apple expert. I am surprised how arrogant he is. His name is Sean and he said “contact Microsoft and that’s the final answer” even after I pointed out to him that there are many other people reported the same issues all over the internet.

Totally frustated, I googled deeper and finally found this post below. Following that post, I believe it solved the freezing issue as it doesn’t freeze for several days. It is a driver issue with Nvidia. I included the post below just in case you had the same issue.

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=54536

As I said, I am not alone on this issue. It is a very common issue and Apple technical support should be aware of it and take supporting boot camp with Vista seriously. Afterall, Mac only has less than 10% market share.

Apple, you disappointed me!