Romain Guy's Blog

Synth needs you!

J2SE 1.5 introduced a brand new look and feel called Synth. As you might already know, this look and feel is really a skin engine based on XML files. You can use it to easily create a new look and feel for your applications without having to struggle with Swing's UI delegates. The XML file format also allows you to easily generate new skins on the fly. You can give the users the power to customize the look and feel and to save their changes.

Despite its numerous qualities, Synth suffers from bugs and some features are missing. I am currently using it at Sun Microsystems to develop a new look and feel. I already ran into several problems that prevent me from implemeting the look and feel the way I want. Hopefully, I - and Scott Violet who helps me a lot to get started - will fix these problems.

The problem is we will soon reach a feature freeze state and I won't be able to easily introduce changes in the public API. That is why I ask you to help me: if you ever used Synth and encountered any missing feature or any show stopping bug, send me an email. I know the bug parade is here but I also know that it can be inconvenient for you to use it. It is also faster for me to get a direct feedback.

Please do not report all the bugs you find (especially phony ones :). I really need to know what Synth lacks *today*. For instance you can't draw a scrollbar track according to its orientation (vertical or horizontal).

Synth needs you :)

Comments

• Is this a call only for bugs? Given that the driver for Synth was user-friendliness, is it as friendly as can be? Can Sun ship a Synth skin builder, and if not, at the least a skin viewer, that really makes building Synth skins a graphical operation rather than a coding one (I view writing XML as coding)?

  Posted by: sumitkishore on May 31, 2005 at 03:43 PM

• Synth is indeed friendly but before providing any Skin builder/viewer, I'd need to get rid of as many bugs and implement as many features as possible. Frédéric Lavigne from L2FProd.com has started working on such a builder and I myself wrote a couple of tools to help creating Synth skins. This is not the priority though ;)

  Posted by: gfx on May 31, 2005 at 03:46 PM

• Ahh, the Unix/Windows, Eclipse/Netbeans divide. I thought Synth was developed around JDK1.4 time, and released with 1.5. If productivity tools are not a priority for Mustang, when will they be? I would have thought that if Sun was not ready to provide (1) samples (2) tools (3) reasonable tutorials of Synth at the time of releasing Synth with JDK1.5, it was not really ready to release Synth.

  Posted by: sumitkishore on May 31, 2005 at 06:37 PM

• Well first, the look and feel I'm working on will serve as a sample. And believe me, the tutorials you can find on the web today (one by Scott Violet and one on developerWorks) are far enough to understand how to use Synth. Concerning the tools, I don't see the point of focusing on them as long as Synth is not ready for complex look and feels. By the way, you can help us and contribute :)

  Posted by: gfx on May 31, 2005 at 06:42 PM

• What about setting JFrame, JDialog decoration w/ Synth ?
  With 1.4 it was not possible ...

  Posted by: draccagni on June 01, 2005 at 06:38 AM

• What about setting JFrame, JDialog decoration w/ Synth ?
  With 1.4 it was not possible ...

  Posted by: draccagni on June 01, 2005 at 06:39 AM

• Decorating frames is missing but I won't put it on top of my priorities list :(

  Posted by: gfx on June 01, 2005 at 09:33 AM

• This is silly. Simply don't freeze the API until you feel it is ready, otherwise you will end with a half-assed design.

  Take a look at JMF, JAI and other Sun APIs that have been allowed to roam free for years. JMF, JAI offspring slowly migrate their way into JDK core when they become mature, but not before.

  Gili

  Posted by: cowwoc on June 01, 2005 at 03:25 PM

• I tried hard, but I could not find a way .. so I am posting this here: Can we use "custom" properties in the synth xml file? i.e., let's say, I use JComponent->putClientProperty to set "REQUIRED" or "INVALID" to "true". It will be great if I can use it use it in Synth's XML to modify the UI to visually indicate this. - thanks - Pramod.

  Posted by: pramod_patel on August 16, 2005 at 10:19 PM

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