We started by changing the most important and central features (there is a lot of code that uses old collections, changing it all will be challenging and sometimes not worth the hassle e.g. HTMLComponent). So we changed the TextArea, Component, Container, Display & DefaultListModel to use

the ArrayList class. We chose those since they are central and should yield the greatest performance benefit, we also chose them because they are well encapsulated and thus the change should be completely seamless API wise.

We also added

Map/Collection support to the Util write object classes and Storage serialization code. So if you pass a vector or hashtable to the code it will act like before, however if you pass a different collection (e.g. ArrayList) or Map (e.g. HashMap) it will be stored properly as well. Right now when we unmarshal (read) the data for a Map or Collection we will always create as HashMap or ArrayList never creating the actual concrete class, the reason we can’t do that is that if we saved the class name and it was obfuscated this might break between revisions.

So this was the “low hanging fruit” now comes the tough part… Some developers have asked us in the past to generify some interfaces e.g. EventDispatcher, ListCellRenderer & DefaultListModel. To be honest I’m not so sure how well this will work but I understand the value of being able to do that. I have some concerns about binary compatibility for these cases but from my understanding it should be possible.

How important would this be to you guys?

Do you want to see our common interfaces generified?

As a side note we also added an ability in our cloud server to send email messages directly from the app, which can be pretty useful since it doesn’t require a working email account or permissions other than networking. Its only available for pro accounts or higher, and allows you to use the Message API’s methods to send an HTML or plain text email directly through our build cloud server. Notice that due to spam issues all emails will arrive from a Codename One address (although you can customize the name of the sender) E.g. to send an email you can do something like this: