Make JVM dialog a child window of native top-level window - swing

I have a legacy, X/Motif, C++ application for which new windows have been added using Java/JNI.
New Java windows have been either top level windows or dialogs with no parent.
Is there any reasonable way to get a child window created by the JVM, such as a JDialog, to have as its parent a window created on the native side using X/Motif, and if yes then how? This would still be useful even if Java AWT/Swing is not aware of the parenting structure and the window manager just kept the dialog on top of the top-level window (of course, having all the normal control over windows in Java would be preferable, just not strictly necessary for all uses of my question).
I am thinking the answer might be "No, not in any reasonable way. You would have to do epic surgery on both your native side and within the JVM." If that is the answer, then so be it. But I am hoping someone has an answer along the lines of "If you make this X call or that window manager call, you can get the window manager to supply certain dialog properties with the argument top-level window as the parent."
Essentially, I am looking to increase the integration between the C++ and Java user interfaces as much as possible. Right now, they are run as one application by using JNI, but the GUI windows/components are essentially separate, despite sharing data.
One benefit of this, already mentioned, is having dialogs not show up behind what the user perceives as the top level window.
Another thing I have considered, though I probably will not do (tell me how crazy you think it is), is to make it appear as though Java components are in the C++ window by getting the screen coordinates of a component on the C++ side, displaying a borderless window on the Java side at that screen location, so it looks like it's part of the C++ application. I can think of so many negative side effects of this, though, that I would not do it unless there was a simple way to negate them (focus issues, a window displaying between this dummy window and the real top level window, and other things would affect user experience). Even avoiding this, though, there are still benefits to an affirmative answer to my question.

If you're using the XToolkit (Java 1.7+), you can proceed as follows:
Get the numeric id of the native peer of a java.awt.Window instance (see this answer).
Find the corresponding X11 Window struct by its id by iterating the clients of the X server (see the sources of xwininfo and xlsclients utilities, also Select_Window_Args(int*, char**)).
Use XReparentWindow().

Related

What is the best practice for displaying huge chat logs or console logs in a scrollable window? (AS3)

I'm writing a graphic console that highlights different entries and stores things when you input them (in AS3) but I've found that once there are thousands of entries, the program starts lagging and scrolling is slow. If I want scrolling to be animated with acceleration it gets even slower.
How do I move the giant block of objects that are my stored entries up and down?
Do I have to progressively load messages around where the user is looking? How does the scrollbar handle this, then?
you should create a custom container instead TextField, it would be easier to build an accelerated scrolling too,
each log entry would be an extended DisplayObject that holds anything you want just like inflating layouts in android.
the most important part should be reducing Memory usage:
you may only store plain text of log enteries in something like a global array and when scroll position is close enough, generate this layouts, then adding them in container to show, and vice versa for removing far behind chats.
however this proccess stills using much memory during runtime.
so, just according the concept of android's DiskLruCache, it is possible to storing some part of our invisible data which would be too far from our scroll position to disk instead memory, using SharedObject's.
How do I move the giant block of objects that are my stored entries up
and down?
You don't. As you have noticed, when the number Display Objectson the DisplayList greatly increases, the memory overhead increases and the housekeeping details of managing the Display Objectseventually causes performance to suffer. You don't mention any details of how you are implementing what you have so far so my comments will be general.
The way this is handled by various platform list components in Flex, iOS and I assume, Flash, is to only display the minimum number of objects needed, and as the user scrolls, objects are shuffled in and out of the render list. A further optimization is to use a "pool" of "template" objects which are reused so you don't pay a initialization time penalty. There is probably an actual name for this ("...buffering...") technique but I don't know what it is (hopefully some kind person will provide it and a link to a fuller description for how it works).
And as for how it works – you can DIY it, figuring out, as the user scrolls, which objects are moving off-screen and can be recycled, which are going to move on-screen, etc. Of course this all assumes that you have your objects stored in a data structure like and Array, ArrayList or ArrayCollection. As an alternative to coding all this from scratch, you might see if the DataGrid or List components will meet your needs – they manage all of this for you.
Flash Tutorial: The DataGrid Component (youTube video)
Customize the List component
Lots of other examples and resources out there.
(again, I work in Flex where the DataGrid and other list-based components can customized extensively using "skins" and custom item renderers for visual style – not sure if it is the same in Flash)

HTML5 Drag and Drop with multiple different drop targets, dropEffect, multiselect, etc

I'm currently experimenting with HTML5 Drag and Drop API. Now I've got several questions:
1.
Am I right, that it's not possible to connect draggable elements with drop-areas?
Example: You have 2 different kinds of elements you want to be able to drag and drop: Files and Text-Labels. Now if I give some div an DragOver-Handler and a Drop-Handler it will respond to both, files and text-labels. I'm looking for a simple possibility to only respond to a specific type of draggable items.
A connected problem is the dropEffect cursor-style: At the moment I enable all possible drop-targets in the DragStart-Handler and disable all of them in the DragEnd-Handler (with "disable" I mean, that I remove all DragOver- and Drop-Handlers). If I wouldn't do so, it'll look like if you could drop a file on an element that should only react to text-labels.
2.
The dropEffect cursor-style is a mess. In Firefox I don't get them at all, in Chrome it will give me a big "plus"-icon (even if I have removed the DragOver- and Drop-Handlers from an element)
3.
Last feature I am looking for is multi-select: Select multiple Text-Labels and then drag all of them at a time. Is this possible? My first idea was to create a new div and move all selected elements inside this div and then drag the newly created div. Seems pretty hackish and looks quite ugly ;-)
I hope you guys have some answers for me. Thanks!
I don't think that HTML5 drag and drop (and friends) are supposed to be replacements for commonly used "drag and drop" Javascript libraries (although it COULD be used instead of them in some cases). The name is misleading.
Modern operating systems include APIs that allow cross-application communication: clipboard and drag-and-drop. Both APIs are quite similar and need to be quite low-level because of specific challenges:
the data must be sent across processes, so it must be somehow serialized,
the sender must have a way way of offering the data in many formats (eg. text/plain and text/html) and the receiver the ability to pick one that it likes best,
the sender and receiver may live in different processes, so they can never find out about each other (they might even be entities coming from different platforms, GUI frameworks, programming languages etc.), the only channel of communication is the data itself,
Current HTML5 APIS, as opposed to - say - JQueryUI draggables - are not meant to give programmer strict control of the look and feel of the dragging process, but rather enable tight integration with the native, system-wide mechanisms. Which may or may not be what the programmer needs.
So to answer the questions:
you cannot "connect draggable elements with drop-areas", because your draggable elements can even come from outside the browser. But you can make an area that rejects certain types of data (which is what user expects from native drag and drop).
"div" and "multiselect" are not things that operating system understands (we don't have native multi-cliboards or multiple-text-selections). You CAN implement such functionality if you make a with inner divs that can be toggled (eg. by clicking while holding shift). When someone tries to drag the outer dive, make a transfer object that says which inner divs were selected (you could even create an image that shows them).
If the above solutions sound a bit low-level, well - that's because they are. When you develop a desktop game or tool, you do not rely on native drag and drop for moving pieces across the chessboard or moving sliders in the GUI. I think it will be the same with JavaScript. JQueryUI Draggables are not going anywhere.

crop screen maximized resolution

i would like to create some Flex Desktop Application that will be always in front of other applications (appWindow.alwaysInFront = true). It should looks like tiny bar at the top of the screen (eg. width = screenWidth, height = 50px). I know how to do that. But I have problem with other applications - when i maximize them, they are under my application. Is there any way how to say to the system, that maximized resolution for other apps is other than default?
Thanks for your answer.
You cannot do this with flash code, because you're interfering with external applications. At best, you could write some native code in another language and use AIR to execute that code but I can't really see that working out well, or at least being anything less than a massive undertaking.
If you do want to attempt this however, you can find some info about executing native code from AIR here: How can i on button press execute a command in the command prompt and get back the output in ActionScript?

Dynamic UI window drawing in Flash?

Wasn't sure if this question belongs here, but I'll try. So I'm about to move my project from Director | Shockwave Player (if you ever heard of these) to Flash Player for numerous reasons and while I'm thinking how to better start off I got a question which really made me wonder. To the point.
Currently in Director each game window in the user interface (like small alerts or large windows with lot of elements in them) is drawn upon need - meaning that the actual window's graphical image is being put together from configuration (all sorts of properties like width, height and all elements and their properties) from numerous pieces of graphics (e.g. window background is made from 9 small pieces like the 4 corners, 4 middle pieces between corners for dynamic width and height and 1 central piece to fill the window) and then added to stage. This approach makes it easy to edit each graphical element without having to redraw the actual windows and everything in them if we would like to change the color scheme or improve something in a element. It also saves the resources as windows are being drawn only when requested.
Now I got to figure out if it's worth writing such code in Flash too as opposite to just creating all the windows and placing them in the library and adding to stage when they are requested. What do you think? Is it worth writing such implementation?
IMO, it depends on 1) How comfortable you are with Flash's drawing API / graphics class, and 2) How flexible each window/dialog needs to be.
If it's easier to just throw them together as static objects -- and if they don't necessarily need the flexibility to change dimensions/style much (can you count on one hand how many times they've needed to change since it was originally done in Director many years ago?), it's obviously easier to do this than going through the time/energy to recreate them dynamically, especially if you're not very comfortable with Flash's drawing API.
That said, a lot can be accomplished dynamically with Flash's drawing API, so if you have the time/interest I'd certainly suggest digging in and doing it the "right" way if you want to familiarize yourself with the drawing API.
My method for doing this sort of thing usually goes like this:
Create a separate class that extends Sprite/MovieClip; something like 'Dialog.as'.
Create public init(), show(), and hide() methods, and a private build() method.
init() is called just once upon initialization of your app, and takes some global parameters to hold on to internally (padding, colors, etc).
show() takes an argument of either text (a String), or even a Sprite/MovieClip -- whatever it is you want to show in this dialog. When called (when you want to spawn a window), it uses this -- plus whatever init parameters were originally passed in during init() -- to draw itself, and then unhides itself (tween the .alpha property, or simply set the .visible property).
When you want to close the dialog, make sure to invoke the hide() method, which first hides itself, and then cleans up whatever was created (removing listeners, etc) so that the next time it is called upon it can draw itself fresh.
It might also make sense to pass into this object a reference to the Stage (in the original init() call), so that it can center and size itself accordingly on the stage, and also addChild itself to the top of the display list so that it's always above everything else.
I hope this helps.
If is 2D you can check this:
http://pushbuttonengine.com/
if is 3D you can start here:
http://alternativaplatform.com/en/alternativa3d/
I can suggest you also Unity3D but this is outside of flash
Hope it helps

generically detecting html position changes using jquery?

I'm using the excellent BeautyTips plugin as a means of indicating validation failures to end users and I'm running into positioning problems whenever page content is dynamically added, removed, or animated.
Here's a concrete example. I have a DIV at the top of each page that’s used for confirmation/error messages. It's displayed in $(document.ready) using slideToggle(). This naturally "pushes" all subsequent html content down, throwing off the positioning/alignment of the beautytips. If I call the plug-in's built-in refresh method after slideToggle() has fired, said positioning problems are corrected. You can see the before/after screen-shots here and here.
One possible workaround would be to programmatically detect DOM changes, specifically changes to css, so that I could then loop over each beautytip and manually reload it. However, it appears that there are no native jQuery events which expose such functionality. I've seen the impressive jQuery plug-in by Rick Strahl that monitors CSS changes, but it seems based on the assumption that one knows ahead of time the specific HTML element(s) they wish to monitor. I want to monitor the entire document, since I can't be expected to know what html elements might exist on a given page that a) are going to be animated and b) would be at such a position in the document that they would "push" down the my beautytips. And I certainly don't want to have to incur the massive performance penalty of polling every block level element in the document.
I should mention that the plug-in works perfectly if I use it in its default "hover" mode in which beautytips are displayed only in response to user mouse input. Unfortunately, there is a design constraint imposed on the application that states all validation errors must be displayed after form submission without additional user interaction.
I'm sure there's a really simple/elegant fix that is completely eluding me. I could avoid all of this hassle, of course, by simply not using animation to display page content, but that seems like a high price to pay.