Java Applet, AWT Refresh, issue on Mac OS X 10.4 - java

We have a Java Applet built using AWT. This applet lets you select pictures from your hard drive and upload them to a server. The applet includes a scrollable list of pictures, which works fine in Windows, Linux and Mac OS X 10.5. We launch this applet via Java Web Start or within a web page.
Our applet does not behave properly in Mac OS X 10.4, regardless of the version of Java (1.4 or 1.5). You can find a screenshot of the incorrect behaviour, when scrolling, here:
http://www.lavablast.com/tmp/ui_error.png
Simply put, sometimes when scrolling the pictures end up overlapping the header or footer of the application. This behaviour does not occur on other platforms. On Mac OS X 10.4, it shows the pictures in the incorrect location when scrolling, which would not be so bad if it refreshed the screen after painting the image at that location. However, it does not appear that the application knows it painted it incorrectly and thus does not refresh.
If the window is minimized, resized or even moved, the application is refreshed and the incorrectly positioned elements vanish and the application resumes normally. I spent quite some time trying to force a refresh of the background image unsuccessfully. (the repaint the image directly, repaint all children of a few panels, etc. ) Thus, I am looking for any tips that would help me resolve this problem under Mac OS X 10.4 or, in the worst case, simply simulate a full applet refresh.
Until recently, everything was compatible with Java 1.1 but this has changed in a few locations which now require 1.4. I don't feel these changes created the issue, I am just providing this as extra information. If you are interested in implementation details of the scroll panel, I will investigate, but I am assuming this is a common platform bug for which workarounds must be known.
To replicate the problem, open the following Java Web Start application:
http://www.lavablast.com/tmp/opal-webstart.php.jnlp
Select a folder containing lots of images and play with the scrollbar. At some point (fairly quickly), you should get the refresh problem.
Edit: I followed the first suggestion here and replaced all my controls that feature background images with a Swing equivalent and the issue is still there. (Plus, there are numerous other fixes I would need to do to do a complete change). Any other ideas? A simple one line of code that forces a full refresh would be great :)
Edit2: The main thread creates the panels and launches X threads. Using an observer/notifier pattern, the threads complete and notify the main control, which adds a panel to the page. This is done via an EventQueue.invokeLater which, unless I am mistaken, should run on the right thread. The issue is at its most severe when scrolling even if no extra threads are running (as during the loading).

It does look like mixing lightweight (usually Swing) and heavyweight (AWT) components together. Moving to Swing you need to replace every last AWT component Swing equivalents (hint: avoid import java.awt.*).
Threading is often a potential problem for odd bugs. Swing components must always be used on the EDT (use java.awt.EventQueue.invokeLater). AWT is thread-safe is theory, but not in practice - also restrict usage to the EDT.

As you already require Java 1.4 you should consider some small changes to take into use SWING GUI instead, it solved our Applet refresh issues with AWT. (Mac, Linux etc)
If you have e.g. Panel, you need to replace it with JPanel etc.
You need this:
import javax.swing.*;

Related

Can CheerpJ extend Java mouseDragged actions outside an applet frame?

In this page the CheerpJ conversion of the applet in this page (with identical byte-code) does not seem to recognize mouse dragging past the applet frame boundary. It would be nice if that were possible.
Is this just a problem with my client-side setup (Linux Debian 9.2), or do others see the same behvior?
What is very strange, is that the original behavior is converted correctly on the not-supported-by-CheerpJ iphone browsers (I have checked safari and firefox there). Could investigation of this fact help CheerpJ developers understand how to make the MouseMotionListener interface recognize mouse dragging anywhere on the screen, not just within the applet frame?
Maybe this is impossible, but I thought it was worth asking.
Edit: Changed title to be less negative about CheerpJ (which overall I find almost too cool to be true!) and more reflective of actual the question.
The mouseDragged method is correctly implemented to the best of our understanding. The Java event is derived from the mousemove JavaScript event which is not delivered when the mouse is outside of the applet surface. With the legacy plugin applets are displayed on native windows which have different behavior.
It could be possible that using different JavaScript events, like mousedrag would make CheerpJ behavior more similar to native, but reworking this without causing regressions would require significant work and it is not currently a priority for us. Especially considering that our customers normally have full screen Swing applets which cannot exhibit the problem
On mobile devices the touchmove event is used, which is probably what causes the difference you see.
If you want to report a bug you can do it here: https://github.com/leaningtech/cheerpj-meta/issues

LWJGL java.awt.HeadlessException thrown when making a JFrame

Hi I'm working on a group project and the code works on my teammate's PCs but I keep hitting MacOS specific errors. And this time I seem to be stuck (no easily Googleable answer).
In a previous post I discovered I need "-Djava.awt.headless=true" as VM setting to properly run my simulation. Now when I try to spawn in some JFrame they are all met with a lovely "java.awt.HeadlessException" Exception because of that VM flag.
Trying to achieve
I want to be able to spawn those JFrames on my MacBook also.
The problem
I need -Djava.awt.headless to be both true and false at the same time for my program to run properly on Mac. Which if I understand my problem correcly, means I have a big problem on my hands.
EDIT: running it in a VM on my Macbook allowed me to run the project properly. This is far from an ideal fix. I'm still searching for a solution to this obscure problem.
What I tried
not running with the VM option: the problem described in previous post occurs. Thus this is not a viable option
running with the VM option: this throws a -Djava.awt.headless when creating a JFrame.
The best way to fix this may be by going back and solving your original problem a different way.
You must make sure that you are not initializing your BufferedImage in the main thread (GLFW thread), it MUST be done separately. It is hard to tell from your original question, but that looks like part of the cause there. Start a new thread to do the image processing instead.
See my solution and recommendation at the bottom of this answer for a quick summary, and also see here for someone else that had the same issue: Java Creating Instance of BufferedImage Freezes Program
A quick note on why your code works on Windows and not Mac: that is because both OS often run different implementations of openGL, and typically Mac can lag behind and miss out on a bunch of updates/changes that may solve problems like this one so that it doesn’t freeze when initializing a BufferedImage on the openGL thread.
If the above didn’t work then lets first look at what headless mode is. (Emphasis mine):
See link at bottom for full article and more info.
Headless mode is a system configuration in which the display device,
keyboard, or mouse is lacking. Sounds unexpected, but actually you can
perform different operations in this mode, even with graphic data.
Where it is applicable? Let's say that your application repeatedly generates a certain image, for example, a graphical authorization code
that must be changed every time a user logs in to the system. When
creating an image, your application needs neither the display nor the
keyboard. Let's assume now that you have a mainframe or dedicated
server on your project that has no display device, keyboard, or mouse.
The ideal decision is to use this environment's substantial computing
power for the visual as well as the nonvisual features. An image
that was generated in the headless mode system then can be passed to
the headful system for further rendering.
So when should headless mode be used:
On a machine that has no display device, keyboard, or mouse.
That is not you is it? However if that is you (LWJGL?), then lets look at how you can work with headless mode:
An image that was generated in the headless mode system then can be
passed to the headful system for further rendering.
This means that you should have a special piece of headless code that does your headless image stuff, but then passes the image back to a normal JFrame with a head.
So why does it fail for you:
Many components are affected if a display device, keyboard, or mouse
is not supported. An appropriate class constructor throws a
HeadlessException
Button
Checkbox
Choice
Dialog
FileDialog
Frame
Label
List
Menu
MenuBar
MenuItem
PopupMenu
Scrollbar
ScrollPane
TextArea
TextField
Window
Solution to the problem:
some classes, such as Canvas or Panel, can be executed in headless mode.
Perfect, so we just need to be careful what is used in headless mode. You asked how you can both use and not use headless mode, well rather than globally setting headless mode with VM option -Djava.awt.headless you can do it programmatically within your code using System.setProperty("java.awt.headless", "true"); where needed. A JFrame should be normal (not Headless), but you can spawn a JPanel as headless without issue.
I recommend:
You create a normal headed main thread with no VM option that spawns JFrames, and then use that main thread to spawn a new child thread and set your LWJGL bits in that thread to be headless, and that way you can run your LWJGL code without issue, and at the same time you can still have JFrames from your main thread. Remember to make sure that the Buffered image is not done in the main LWJGL/OpenGL thread.
Headless info source:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/javase/headless-136834.html

Is it possible to have a transparent JavaFX window with decoration(minimise, maximize, close)

I know in java-fx to make the window transparent, you need to set the stage style as stage.initStyle(StageStyle.TRANSPARENT);. However this will also remove any stage decorations so this does not solve my problem.
The reason I need this is because my application will need to use stage.setAlwaysOnTop(); at certain points, but this feature is not well supported on the target system (centOS). The application also requires stage.setIconnified();, but this does not work if the stage is undecorated.
Any suggestions will be appreciated.
Thanks
The short answer would be "no, you can't" ... because the minimize/maximize/close buttons are part of the decoration. No decoration - no buttons. It would be a contradiction in itself.
If you need the functionality of those buttons, you would have to create your own buttons as a part of your UI and emulate the behaviour of the decoration buttons. That's what many apps do that come with no default decoration.
Anyway, if you want to manipulate the window behaviour in this way (stay-on-top/iconify, etc.) you always need to take the underlying operating system into account. Any apps (not only Java apps) are only allowed to interfere with window management as far as the OS windowing system allows them to do so.
For example, in various MS Windows versions, the OS behaviour changed several times at this point.

java applet using Next-generation plug-in

I have a web application (struts 1.3, Weblogic 10.3.0, Toplink, Oracle) that has a Java applet which isn’t working in the browser (IE7/8) when the Next-Generation Plug-in setting is enabled in the Java control panel but works fine when it’s disabled. The trouble is that this setting is set to disappear in an upcoming Java release meaning that my users would have to keep using Java 1.6_xx on their workstations as they are currently. I have little influence over which version they use because they are all governed by their local IT departments across the country. So, either I have to find a simple fix to allow the Next-Generation setting to work, or we have to look at replacing/rewriting the applet with something else (but would be a last resort due to funding constraints), most likely something AJAX-friendly so as to avoid the need for a plugin. This application is quite old, written around 2001 before AJAX was really around.
The main window has a left, right, and top frame (JSP’s), as well as a center frame which is where the applet is. The applet has a main content area in the middle and a lower panel at the bottom which has some buttons. The buttons tell the content area (which is basically a treegrid) what to do (Save, Copy, change status, etc ). When I press one of the buttons the entire window (surrounding frames plus the applet itself) repeat inside the area where the applet is. It’s like a kaleidoscope or like a repeating fractal pattern kind of thing, or like when you take a picture of yourself in the mirror and you see the room repeated over and over in the mirror. In this case it repeats for each button press and the repeated set gets smaller each time. Weird!!
So, based on my research, the Java Next-Generation plugin works differently by allowing more than one process or thread whereas the classic plugin only uses a single thread. So my suspicion is that a new process is being spawned for each button press. I tried using the “separate_jvm” applet parameter but it made no difference whether it was set to true or false. I don’t see any other applet parameters which seem to be relevant.
Another idea I had is that maybe it’s something to do with the JSP frameset, maybe something like “target=_top” needs to be added somewhere…but I’m not sure how this relates to applet threads if at all.
Anyone have any suggestions, ideas or experiences that might help?
you can use velocity to handle these type of problem and it will also help you for future enhancement also.
The problem is not related to version of IE but rather to version of Java. Below excerpt from letter of certificate provider (they took it from some forum, so direct link to source cannot be provided):
For JDK version higher than 1.6.0 and below 1.6_15, you can just
clear all kinds of cache in web browser, java console and java control
panel. Then it should works fine!
For JDK version between 1.6_15 and 1.6_30, you should disable the "next-generation java" option in java control panel.
For JDK version higher than 1.6_30, you should turn on "next-generation java" option in java control panel.

Substance L&F seems to break when deployed as webstart in java

I think I am having a weird problem:
I 've written a small application in java implementing a JTable to display some results.
I am also using the Substance L&F as my "skin".
Everything seems to be working perfectly.
When I upload the app on my server as webstart, strange things start to happen:
At some point my app generates a little JTable. Every time I mouse over that table,
the app's JButtons or menus or any swing control in general will stop responding. My only option is to close the window and restart the application. Note that the interface seems not to be frozen but like it's lost its focus... if I try to click in any of the table's cells, the UI will still be responsive (not on the swing controls though).
If I get rid of Substance, the problem goes off and everything is working normally again.
If I use another "skin" like JTattoo everything works flawlessly as well.
This only happens when I use the webstart. Does anybody know why..?
or better has any hints on how to fix it?

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