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Library Update & NativeInterface Generics

Library Update & NativeInterface Generics

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We just updated the library with our last ad hoc release, starting next week we will release libraries every Friday
and occasionally also a plugin update within that same proximity. We made some refinements to some
Android theme elements and one of those refinements is a new TitleArea drop shadow.

This effectively creates a situation where we can’t reasonably detect an empty title and so if you want the title
to truly disappear you can either:

  • Set the TitleArea border attribute to empty

  • Do something like form.getToolbar().setUIID("Container")

We released an update for the Eclipse plugin but are experiencing some issues with the NetBeans update
center which we will hopefully resolve before the weekend.

As a side note we are working hard to re-imagining the IntelliJ/IDEA plugin, but our current approach will
probably still rely on Ant instead of a move to gradle or maven. Both of these seem like really good ideas
on paper but at the moment they might not be as convenient. I’ll try to write a bit on the process as we
move forward and have a clearer picture on this.

NativeInterface Generics

The NativeInterface API’s haven’t changed much since their inception but we just committed a small
nice to have feature.

Up until now if you wanted to get a reference to your native interface you would have to do this:

MyNativeInterface m = (MyNativeInterface)NativeLookup.create(MyNativeInterface.class);

With the new version you can now do this:

MyNativeInterface m = NativeLookup.create(MyNativeInterface.class);

That’s a nice trick generics can pull off by setting the method signature to:

public static <T extends NativeInterface> T create(Class<T> c);

I wasn’t a big fan of generics when they came out and I still don’t like the declaration of the method but the end
result is really nice.

Documentation Update

We are on the brink of 700 pages for the developer guide and I think we’ll finish just shy of 1000 for this iteration.

This work is taking some time but it’s totally worth the effort as the level of the documentation is at a league
of its own. E.g. check out the IO section in the guide here.
The original was remarkably bare and didn’t cover so many basic things that should be covered e.g.
the webservice wizard, SliderBridge
etc…​

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