This post is part of my Java Look and Feel Journey. See this post for more details and table of contents (and to find a proper tutorial when it’s available).
That post will also guide you to another tutorial on using Java’s Components & Layouts, so you can make a program to actually see the Look & Feel changes. At this point in the journey, you’d only need the first post, to have a button on screen to see the changes to it, but going further in that series is fine too.
This is part 8 of the “Journey” posts. Follow this link for part 1: Getting Started or this link for the previous part: 7. Tadukoo Util Placement
Apparently I dumped the old “Make Paint Great Again” post in transferring my blog posts over to this new blog. I hadn’t posted it over on blogger yet, but I had definitely written it up and created the commit in Tadukoo Look & Feel for it. Unfortunately, I deleted the old blogger drafts and posts at this point, so I’m writing this much later after the fact.
The goal to “make paint great again” was to make it so that all the paint/color/gradient UI resources would exist through a standard interface so that I wouldn’t have to be checking if I was given a paint, gradient, or simple color. That’s what PaintUIResource is for. It’s now an interface that extends UIResource (because that’s how you do it in Java to let it know it’s a UIResource). The main method in the interface that’s relevant is getPaint(Dimension size), which returns a Paint object to use in painting. The dimensions are given because gradients require a size to determine where certain points are.
getColorUIResource() and getMetalGradientList() exist so that I can still support component UI objects from other Look & Feels (e.g. MetalLookAndFeel). A lot of the Look & Feel UI components require a plain color, which is what the ColorUIResource is for. MetalLookAndFeel requires a stupid List
So now that I had a PaintUIResource interface, I had to create a new class to handle basic colors under this interface. Hence ColorPaintUIResource. It extends ColorUIResource (and initializes itself with one, or with some parameters to create a Color. For getPaint and getColorUIResource it returns itself (since it is itself a Paint and ColorUIResource). For getMetalGradientList it sets up the List
After this, I modified my GradientUIResource class (static within Gradient) to be a PaintUIResource properly, which just meant moving the getMetalGradientList() method into it instead of the Gradient itself, and to add the new getColorUIResource method, which just uses the first color of the Gradient.
TadukooTheme underwent massive changes, as I no longer had to have a ton of methods for each color resource in it, just one to handle a PaintUIResource for each unique color/paint/gradient. So it really slimmed down that class:
In TadukooLookAndFeel, I changed the initComponentDefaults method so it will set the new PaintUIResources for use by it, and also set the proper old UIResources in case we’re going to use some of the component UI classes from other Look & Feels. This provides support for using any of them:
And finally for this change, I modified TadukooButtonUI so that it will use the new PaintUIResource instead of trying to use the old select ColorUIResource and/or Metal’s gradient list:
Here’s a link to the GitHub commit for the changes made in this post.
Next time, we’ll be dealing more with shapes of components. Also next time should be a more detailed/interesting post, since I won’t be writing it months after the fact.