Java 9 compatibility issues

mainrs commented 8 years ago

Hello there :)

I know that it will take some time till Java 9 is coming out but they already announced that they want to modulize the JRE. That means that they can tweak which packages will be available to use (in a way that osgi is already doing it with the 'Export-Packages' property). That would sadly mean that your solution (using the sun classes) would not run and throw a SecurityException because you are trying to access classes that can't be accessed from the outside of personal package names.

0x4a616e commented 8 years ago

Hi, that's a good point. To be honest, I haven't looked at Java 9 classes yet. I know, however, that there were at least plans to create an API to access the native OS X menu bar, so that would definitely be the preferred way to solve this. If this API is not going to make it into Java 9, another option would be to use own native methods. I've been thinking about this for some time, as it would allow for some new things like accessing the context menu in the dock icon.

mainrs commented 8 years ago

True, I would really like to get some native stuff going for this. Though that I am not skilled enough for C/C++. I think it should be possible with JNA.

0x4a616e commented 8 years ago

I also thought about using JNA, but it is probably not needed. As it turned out, it is quite simple to write a library in objective-c that can be called from Java. I created a branch where i added some native methods here: https://github.com/codecentric/NSMenuFX/tree/own-native-adapter It currently just implements the "Hide ", "Hide Others" and "Show all" menu items, but it can easily be extended. It might however take some time until the entire menu-bar stuff is implemented... :wink:

mainrs commented 8 years ago

Nice. I would help out but I have zero experience with objective-c (sadly). Even after working for over 4 yours on OS X, I still stick to Java.

mainrs commented 8 years ago

Mind if I ask how far the native implementation is?

0x4a616e commented 8 years ago

Good morning Sir! Well, the native code is all there, what's left is some code to map javafx objects to the respective native objects but that is all happening in Java. I think that half of the stuff (rough estimate) is already done, but right now I don't have much time to continue working on this.

mainrs commented 8 years ago

Good Morning :) Do you have a rough idea how the API should look like? If you are ok with it, I can try to write it later on.

0x4a616e commented 8 years ago

That'd be great! I pushed my latest changes I have locally on the own-native-adapter branch. The current state of the API can be found in de.codecentric.centerdevice.cocoa.SampleApp. However, nothing is really carved in stone... The basic concept is currently like this:

NSMenu represents the native object in Java
NSMenuFX is an adapter for JavaFX objects to native objects

As an example, you can create an adapter like this:

Menu menu = new Menu("Title");
// ...
NSMenuFX menuFX = new NSMenuFX(menu);

NSMenu nsMenu = menuFX.getNsMenu();
NSApplication.sharedApplication().mainMenu().itemAtIndex(0).setSubmenu(nsMenu);

Where the last line adds the menu to some existing menu. This line NSMenu nsMenu = menuFX.getNsMenu(); maps the JavaFX object to a "native" objects, and tries to connect all properties. The goal is that when you change a property in JavaFX after the menu bar has been set, the native object should be updated.

When you start working on that, you'll quickly notice that not everything is working yet 😉 I also left a few TODOs in the SampleApp class. If you have time, you can have a look there and see where you can continue. If you have any questions, i'll try to answer as soon as possible :)

mainrs commented 8 years ago

Sounds cool. Gonna take a look at Friday and start working on it 😄