This blog post is an extract of the release note from the NEWS file which you can read online … or in the sources from Bazaar.

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java-gnome 4.0.15 (16 Mar 2010)

Radio things

This has mostly been a bug fix cycle with numerous internal quality improvements being made. A few developer visible API additions have been made, summarized below.

Unified radio handling

There are a number of controls in GTK that exhibit the “radio” behaviour of being in a group of which only one can be selected: RadioButton, RadioMenuItem, RadioToolButton and RadioAction. We originally had a class called RadioButtonGroup which was used when constructing RadioButtons to indicate which group they were a member of. In introducing overage of the other radio types, Guillaume Mazoyer implemented a generic grouping class called RadioGroup which is now used for all the radio types.

XDG utility functions

A number of utility functions (aka static methods) were added to Glib allowing you to access the various user and systems directories as specified by the XDG specification. These are Glib.getUserConfigDir(), Glib.getUserDataDir() and friends.

Miscellaneous improvements

Better control of positioning when popping up context menus; you can specify co-ordinates when calling Menu’s popup().

The no-arg “convenience” packing methods we invented for HBox and VBox were causing more trouble than they were worth because people we not understanding the implications of the “default” packing values. So these are deprecated; the full four-argument packStart() and packEnd() have been present for a long time and are to be used in preference.

Serkan Kaba spent a bit of time working with the text version of the ComboBox API. Apparently no one had needed removeText() so he added that.

A number of improvements to the coverage of GDK’s event masks were merged. This is work originally by Vreixo Formoso necessary to support the Widget.MotionNotifyEvent signal, though it has use in other applications. Widget now has addEvents() and setEvents() to this end.

Finally, Guillaume needed to handle selections in IconViews. The API is similiar to that in TreeView, but doesn’t use the same TreeSelection helper class; the methods are directly on IconView. Boo for asymmetry. Anyway, we’ve exposed isSelected() on both TreeSelection and IconView so you can find out if a given TreePath is currently selected.

Better initialization checking

Logic checking that the library has been properly initialized has been refactored, making it harder to accidentally misuse java-gnome when getting started [or when starting a new program after you've been using the library for years and forgotten the basics :)].

Last but not least, a number of bug fixes; one in Enchant was developer-visible; Enchant.requestDictionary() now returns null like it claimed to if you request an unknown dictionary. Nice catch, Serkan.

All the source files have the full (ie traditional) GPL v2 header text now; the files comprising the library as used at run-time have GPL headers text + the Classpath Exception text. Needed to be done. Makes for a large diff this release, but makes the Ohloh‘s page for java-gnome happy too :).

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You can download java-gnome’s sources from ftp.gnome.org_, or easily checkout a branch from_ ‘mainline‘:

$ bzr checkout bzr://research.operationaldynamics.com/bzr/java-gnome/mainline java-gnome

though if you’re going to do that you’re best off following the instructions in the HACKING guidelines.

Enjoy!

AfC