Weekly update: Zircon

This week was mainly spent with preparing for the next major release:

• The usage of lambdas was streamlined. Now there is a proper interface (Java side) for each method which will accept a lambda and a proper extension function which accepts Kotlin lambdas. So what looks like this in Java: tileGrid.onInput(System.out::println); looks like this in Kotlin: tileGrid.onInput { println(it) }. This way both languages have idiomatic APIs. There are also new examples for each language demonstrating how these things work in their own class in the zircon.examples project.
• Input handling was also streamlined. This was a bit awkward before, but now there are separate Input, KeyStroke and MouseListener interfaces and a nice API to use them. Previously there were seemingly arbitrary functions (like onMouseReleased), but now the concept is fleshed out properly. You can still use the old ways, but behind the scenes it is now clean code.
• The component rendering refactor is now complete, and there are examples with all kinds of decorations for all components. Now all components can be decorated with all decorations including shadow, box, and more. Here are some screenshots and a short description about the purpose of the component:
  • TextBox: a TextBox is for representing textual content without the ability to edit. It supports semantic content elemens like Headers, ListItems and Paragraphs.
  • TextArea: this one is for editing text. It supports displaying the cursor and can be single or multiline
  • RadioButtonGroup is a container of RatioButtons It supports a selection listener and you can add key-value pairs to it. We used key-value pairs because we still have nightmares about the old android Spinner component which just used a flat List<String> and it was horrible to pick items from it.
  • Panel is a Container. This means that you can add other Components to it, or even other Panels.
  • Label is an one-liner non-editable text component.
  • Header is another one-liner non-editable text component but it uses the primary foreground color as opposed to the Label which uses the secondary. This means that by using the Header you can add emphasis to the text on the screen without tampering with styles.
  • CheckBox behaves as you would expect it to. The difference from the RadioButtonGroup is that the selected state is not dependent on other CheckBoxes so they don’t need to be grouped either.
  • Buttons are simple clickable components
• The roadmap for the release is now complete. You can check the ToDo column here, this is what we want to get done before the next major release. This also means that now is the time to speark up if you want to see something in it. :)

A next major release is coming up for this Autumn, so stay tuned.