Hi Walter,
There was an earlier article about efforts to update the JDK codebase
to use new features of the language. Ok, Generics aren't _that_ new but
some new classes/interfaces in Swing finally got generified in Java 7.
But is there a reason why javax.swing.ListModel was generified, but
not its sub-interfaces like ComboBoxModel?
This "type swallowing" actually caused non-fixable compiler errors in
Scala, where the scala-swing package can't be built anymore against the
Java 7 code base.
The relevant bug ticket in Scala's trac is
https://lampsvn.epfl.ch/trac/scala/ticket/3634
Maybe Oracle has already some bug about it? (Didn't bother to look
since Oracle started to make more and more bug reports not visible
anymore.)
Are there any ongoing efforts to add Generics to the remaining classes
of Swing? Swing seems to be one of the last places where Generics are
still missing in a few places ...
What I know of it: the use of generics by Swing is a volunteer effort by
Florian Brunner and his latest patch to generify ComboBoxModel has not
been accepted yet. See the topic [PATCH] 100153: Generics: JComboBox of
the swing-dev list (okt-nov 2010).
With JDK7 declared feature complete I do wonder what will happen - is it
going to ship with only a part of Swing implemented with generics?
https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/show_bug.cgi?id=100153 is marked as P3
which seems to be planned to be fixed
(http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk7/
Rampdown start: P1-P3 bugs only).
https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/show_bug.cgi?id=100029 is the bug for the
JList generics.
You are right: Swing generification is in progress. ComboBoxModel is a
part of JComboBox generification
(https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/show_bug.cgi?id=100153, the preliminary
diff is here
https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/attachment.cgi?id=191&action=diff
<https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/attachment.cgi?id=191&action=diff>).
Regards, Pavel
P.S. The one additional useful link is https://swing-generics.dev.java.net/
Regards, Pavel
Hope that helps,
Walter Laan.
