Comments on: Simply Sweet Components slides

By: Java desktop links of the week, June 15 | Jonathan Giles

Java desktop links of the week, June 15 | Jonathan Giles — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 22:11:57 +0000

[...] of the people I met at JavaOne, Ken Orr has just posted the slides to his ‘Simply Sweet Components’ presentation. Definitely well worth checking [...]

By: Montechristos

Montechristos — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:20:22 +0000

Great post, very actual.

May I propose another way of ‘injecting’ functionality to components: The visitor pattern.

If each component implements a visitor access, then we can add functionality by creating new visitors: e.g. IconVisitor, ColorVisitor, …

By: Ken

Ken — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:55:19 +0000

Thanks Matt! Hopefully other developers will see the light!

By: Matt Ward

Matt Ward — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:40:23 +0000

Awesome post! I am sick of making custom Swing components too. Thanks a bunch for sharing your work with these APIs. I will surely be using them a lot more in the upcoming months.

By: Ken

Ken — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 17:32:01 +0000

Hey Jeremy,

You guessed it — if there are methods exposed that you’re overriding to work-around an issue, that means there is a fundamental flaw in the design.

When an API is developed internally, it’s relatively easy to find the author and talk about your needs as an API consumer. I certainly understand, though, that this communication becomes very difficult when the issues needing work-arounds are in external APIs.

-Ken

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:17:38 +0000

Interesting presentation. I guess I’m so used to the hundreds of methods that I wasn’t phased by their presence. But you make a compelling point; I’ll be more mindful of this in the future.

On the other hand, a lot of the time I end up writing “hackish” fixes for bugs/issues, and I end up overriding or using obscure methods that a cleaner API wouldn’t make available. (You could argue these fixes shouldn’t be necessary in the first place, though.)

By: Ken

Ken — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 09:45:43 +0000

Thanks Kirill K.!

By: Ken

Ken — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 09:43:02 +0000

Hi Amar,

I’m not sure which issues that are still open will get fixed for 0.9.5 — you can email me your most pressing issues.

-Ken

By: Kirill Kalishev

Kirill Kalishev — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 08:45:12 +0000

Very nice presentation, exactly what I came up with making lots of custom swing components for a long time.

Say my hello to Dima Skavish :)

By: Amar

Amar — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 05:47:25 +0000

Thanks Ken. Will this new version include all of the enhancements mentioned in the issues? I want to get the approval from my team to use this library in a product that we want to redesign and providing the enhancements would strengthen my hand.

cheers
Amar