Skip to main content

ListModel turns generic - at last

The features of project coin have been shouted about and argued over for a while now, and other various API changes have also made it into the spotlight - a fork-join framework in java.util.concurrent and the ability to have shaped windows for instance.

However, one thing that seems to have slipped under the spotlight is the fact that ListModel is now generic, a change that's well overdue in my opinion.

http://download-llnw.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/javax/swing/ListModel.html

Dealing with constant casting on list models thus far hasn't been nice, and I'm not sure why it's taken this long for the class to become generic - it's an obvious candidate and I struggle to see how it slipped under the carpet for both Java 5 and 6.

It's a relatively minor change in the grand scheme of things, but sometimes it's the minor changes that actually turn out to be the ones that work best and save most time. I'll certainly look forward to the day when I no longer need to cast everything coming out of listmodels!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The comprehensive (and free) DVD / Blu-ray ripping Guide!

Note: If you've read this guide already (or when you've read it) then going through all of it each time you want to rip something can be a bit of a pain, especially when you just need your memory jogging on one particular section. Because of that, I've put together a quick "cheat sheet" here  which acts as a handy reference just to jog your memory on each key step. I've seen a few guides around on ripping DVDs, but fewer for Blu-rays, and many miss what I believe are important steps (such as ensuring the correct foreign language subtitles are preserved!) While ripping your entire DVD collection would have seemed insane due to storage requirements even a few years ago, these days it can make perfect sense. This guide doesn't show you a one click approach that does all the work for you, it's much more of a manual process. But the benefits of putting a bit more effort in really do pay off - you get to use entirely free tools with no demo versions, it...

Draggable and detachable tabs in JavaFX 2

JavaFX currently doesn't have the built in ability to change the order of tabs by dragging them, neither does it have the ability to detach tabs into separate windows (like a lot of browsers do these days.) There is a general issue for improving TabPanes filed here , so if you'd like to see this sort of behaviour added in the main JavaFX libraries then go ahead and cast your vote, it would be a very welcome addition! However, as nice as this would be in the future, it's not here at the moment and it looks highly unlikely it'll be here for Java 8 either. I've seen a few brief attempts at reordering tabs in JavaFX, but very few examples on dragging them and nothing to do with detaching / reattaching them from the pane. Given this, I've decided to create a reusable class that should hopefully be as easy as possible to integrate into existing applciations - it extends from Tab, and for the most part you create it and use it like a normal tab (you can just add it...

Building windows installers in a Linux CI environment using wine and innosetup

Quelea is by far the "side project" that takes up the majority of my time. To aid with testing, I built in CI relatively early with a Jenkins server running on a custom VM. This was great - I could just push a change to the repo from anywhere, and then point the user to the CI release. They'd download it and be able to confirm whether the fix had worked (or not!) I've since switched to Travis and retired said VM (it's one less thing to maintain, and now everything is on Github.) But both these setups had one main issue - the windows installer wouldn't get built as part of this process, since they were Linux boxes and innosetup doesn't have a linux distribution. Travis has added windows support, but it's in early release, and in any case I'd like the entire build process to be able to run on any Linux box - it makes it both quicker and more transferrable if we ever need to move elsewhere. I therefore looked into using wine in the CI release to ...