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Beauty Secrets

Posted by editor on September 5, 2006 at 8:22 AM PDT


Bringing substance to Swing's look-and-feels

Desktop demands are weird. Give people an MP3 player, and the users will demand it be skinnable, so that one user can see his trackname and time like something from Star Trek, while someone else wants hers in script on mock papyrus. On the other hand, give people a wide-open look-and-feel engine that allows these and effectively any other visualization that developers care to render... and people complain that it doesn't look enough like Windows.

Sometimes it doesn't pay to listen to feedback, does it?

While the Napkin LAF may be one of the best-known third-party look-and-feels, Substance surely deserves to be known by a wider audience. The project has delivered an attractive, production-quality L&F that is distinguished by its extensive theme-ability and the extensive set of themes (which run from the color gamut from cold steel to bright citrus) that ship with it. Also, project owner Kirill Grouchnikov is one of our most prolific bloggers and has a rare understanding of Swing's look-and-feel technology (which he'll be sharing in some upcoming feature articles).

Today's big news is that the Substance project has released version 3.0 of its highly-customizable Swing look-and-feel. This version offers a number of new color themes, improved painting in various places, animated effects, and more. Kirill summarizes the highlights of the new release in his blog Substance LAF 3.0 official release, which includes more screenshots of its top features and a Java WebStart demo.

Further down in Java Today,
Mark Reinhold announces that show-stopper bugs and a high rate of incoming bugs has forced a Java SE 6 schedule update. "With these changes the release candidate will now ship at the end of October and the final release will ship in the first week of December. (It won't be in the last week of November due to the Thanksgiving holiday here in the U.S.) We're also continuing to work with our PC OEM partners to ensure that the Java SE 6 JRE will be included on new PCs at the time of the Windows Vista launch."

Within the Apache world, the idea of running multiple websites off of one server instance is a pretty well-understood problem, and is just a matter of mastering the <VirtualHost> directive in the configuration file. And that's great for static pages or those served via Apache CGI, but for many Java web applications, the server of choice is Tomcat, and Tomcat's way of doing things is entirely different. In How to Publish Multiple Websites Using a Single Tomcat Web Application, Satya Komatineni illustrates how he took a simple, web-based content management system called "Knowledge Folders" and exposed a single instance of it as multiple websites, each with its own unique hostname.

In today's Forums, ss141213 works through JPA misunderstandings in Re: Entity manager in web applications:
"There is nothing called container managed persistence in Java Persistence API. Are you referring to container managed entity manager? If you are using a Servlet 2.5 compliant container like GlassFish (note Tomcat 5.x is not Servlet 2.5 compliant), then I suggest you use container managed entity manager. This can be obtained either by injection (@PersistenceContext) or JNDI lookup. Since you must not inject an entity manager into a multi-threaded servlet, you are left with the option of looking up an entity manager using JNDI in the doGet() or doPost() method of the servlet."

In the GlassFish forums,
anilam is seeking
Feedback on Admin Console one pager:
"Please provide us comments/feedback on the proposed admin console changes in Glassfish V2. An overall document describing this can be found at: AdminGuiOnePager.html. Feedback/review period closes 2 weeks from today. Any comments received after that would not be considered for this release (GlassFish V2)."

In today's Weblogs, John Reynolds invites you to
"Go back with me to the mid-90's and revisit the issues that we had with that closed-source code that we'd purchased," in
Open software pragmatism - Free (as in beer) isn't the point.

Sharing a
Conspiracy theory about closures in Dolphin, Kirill Grouchnikov wonders
"Who would profit from introducing closures into Dolphin..."

Finally, Jean-Francois Arcand announces
Grizzly Framework available on java.net Maven repository: "Since more and more developers are interested to build scalable NIO based server based on GlassFish's HTTP Engine named Grizzly, the binaries and sources are now available outside GlassFish."

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The substance behind Substance...

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