The plan for dialogs

[Jonathan Giles]

Hi all,

ControlsFX has been a victim of its own success. This is a good thing,
but also a time and API destroying thing.

In short, and in case you missed the long-winded discussion over on Jira
[1], the ControlsFX dialogs have been accepted and promoted up to be
part of OpenJFX, starting in the next feature release (JavaFX 8u40).
However, the API that is in ControlsFX is very, very, very different
than the API that is going to be in JavaFX 8u40. For the last few months
all I have been doing is working on dialogs for JavaFX 8u40.

This leaves us in something of a conundrum - we've architected our own
demise. We have a few options, all of which result in users of the
ControlsFX dialogs API eventually being forced off it in favour of the
official API. Even though there are more features in ControlsFX dialogs,
we feel it is important that we do not duplicate functionality. For this
reason, Eugene and I have developed the following plan:

1) We have created a (currently private) repo that contains a fork of
the OpenJFX dialogs API and implementation.

2) From this repo we will be doing builds and pushing the resulting jar
to Maven Central. This build will be necessarily licensed under the
GPLv2 + classpath exception license, as it is taken from OpenJDK (even
if it originally originated from us, this is the best option legally, I
would think, especially as we want to continue to refresh the dialogs
code occasionally from upstream where the ownership swings more into
Oracle's favour).

3) ControlsFX will be adapted to have a dependency on this library for
all releases until we baseline on JavaFX 8u40. Once we baseline on 8u40
this jar will no longer be necessary and we will drop the dependency.

4) The existing dialogs API in ControlsFX will be deprecated but not
removed. This API will be removed when we baseline on JavaFX 8u40. If
you use ControlsFX dialogs, please take the time to transition away from
the old API as soon as possible. If there are things you could once do
that now you can't, please file bugs, although note that we will not be
bringing back all functionality (e.g. I'm sorry to say I won't be
bringing back lightweight dialogs unless someone hands over a big bag of
money).

5) We will use the new openjfx-dialogs.jar to build out a new set of
pre-built dialogs (e.g. font chooser, progress, command link, exception,
etc). This new API will follow the API of the OpenJFX dialogs API, so it
will be different.

So, that's the plan. I hope people can appreciate we're doing our best
to ease the transition, even though it is more work for us. I was quite
happy to make you all go cold turkey and strip out our old dialogs from
the next release, so you should all thank Eugene for caring about you :-)

[1] javafx-jira.kenai.com/browse/RT-12643

--

-- Jonathan

[Werner Lehmann]

Hi,

On 21.08.2014 06:50, Jonathan Giles wrote:
> the old API as soon as possible. If there are things you could once do
> that now you can't, please file bugs, although note that we will not be
> bringing back all functionality (e.g. I'm sorry to say I won't be
> bringing back lightweight dialogs unless someone hands over a big bag of
> money).

do you have some keywords as to which features would be dropped? For
example, we have a dialog with custom content...

> the next release, so you should all thank Eugene for caring about you :-)

I really appreciate the effort to bring good dialog support to FX. IMO
Swing was leaving some things to be desired here. And a big thank you
goes to Eugene for caring :)

Werner

[Jonathan Giles]

Custom content will still definitely be supported in the new API. It already exists in the 8u40 API I've been working on.

Some missing functionality is lightweight dialogs, no cross platform styling, no actions support, etc. Hope that helps.

-- Jonathan
Sent from a touch device. Please excuse my brevity.

[Werner Lehmann]

Makes sense and looks as if we won't have problems because of it.
Platform button order would be nice but I guess it is not a must have.

Werner

[Jonathan Giles]

Platform button order is part of the 8u40 dialogs, so it will be included.

-- Jonathan
Sent from a touch device. Please excuse my brevity.

[cleem...@googlemail.com]

Hi,

I'm trying to update controlsfx from 8.0.6_20 to 8.20.7 in my project.
I'm wondering what's happend with the class org.controlsfx.dialog.DefaultDialogAction?

We have a few Dialogs which uses this class.. I can't find the class neither in controlsfx-8.20.7 nor in openjfx-dialogs-1.0.2.
Do you have any suggestions how to deal with this change?

thanks!


org.controlsfx.dialog.DefaultDialogAction

[Eugene Ryzhikov]

If I'm not mistaken it is renamed to DialogAction. 

http://controlsfx.bitbucket.org/org/controlsfx/dialog/DialogAction.html 

[Charles Monteiro]

Its unfortunate that lightweight dialogs have been killed off, its a very nice look for one i.e. the opaque overlay, and also unfortunate is that I don't have a bag of money to give :)

[Christopher Merrill]

On Thursday, August 21, 2014 at 12:50:38 AM UTC-4, Jonathan Giles wrote:

that now you can't, please file bugs, although note that we will not be
bringing back all functionality (e.g. I'm sorry to say I won't be
bringing back lightweight dialogs unless someone hands over a big bag of
money).

<crying>

So sad, those were very elegant.  I'm going to miss them, and I expect my users will too. Throwing up modal dialogs feels so archaic.

</crying>

[charles....@gmail.com]

I concur

Sent from my whatever 

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