Joshua Marinacci's Blog

Swing Hacks Bonus Article

Time stands still for no man. Technology even less so. The world moves on and we have to adapt.

When Chris and I started writing Swing Hacks it represented the most advanced Swing techniques that we knew at the time. That was almost a year ago, though, and the world has moved on. Java 1.5 has become mainstream (on Windows at least), we've had a successful Desktop track at Java One, and I've joined the Swing team at Sun.

As we were writing the book (and in the months since then) we learned lots of new things, some of which didn't make it into the book for space or time reasons. I've collected some of this new material into an article called Hacking Swing with Undocumented Classes and Properties containing lots of little undocumented features we've discovered over the years.

I was especially disappointed that I didn't get my favorite hack, transparent frames on Mac OS X, into the book so I made sure to include that here. This is my first article for OnJava.com so be sure let me (and O'Reilly) know what you think.

Thanks
- Josh

Comments

• In your linked article you say of the Cocoa java APIs: "These classes have virtually no documentation..."

  What about http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Reference/ApplicationKit/Java/Classes/NSApplication.html ?

  I'd say the Cocoa Java docs at Apple are pretty good.

  Posted by: goron on August 12, 2005 at 10:23 AM

• They do have docs, of course, but these are just the Cocoa docs. They aren't Java specific. This means you pretty much have to know Cocoa programming in order to use them. It's certainly possible to muddle your way through them (i've done it myself for the JDIC Misc project). Cocoa and Java are somewhat similar, but the Cocoa docs are a subsitute for real Java oriented documentation. I get the impression that the Java Cocoa bridge was implemented because they could, not because it was something they wanted people to really use. The notice that they are discontinuing the bridge (or at least, not updating it) confirms my suspicions. :(

  - josh

  Posted by: joshy on August 12, 2005 at 11:12 AM

• Oh dear, I didn't realise they were not keeping it up to date/discontinuing it... I know it lags (WebKit?) but maybe something better is up their sleeve?

  
  

  Posted by: goron on August 12, 2005 at 11:22 AM

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