<Swing Dev> 6179357: Request interface javax.swing.tree.TreeModel to have a generic type for nodes

[Alexander Potochkin]

Hello Florian

Welcome to the swing-dev

The RFE #6179357 is definitely worth investigating
we was going to generify Swing for 1.6
but unfortunately didn't have enough time

Your fixes are welcome

Here is the information how to contribute:
http://openjdk.java.net/contribute/

For now the process is:

Become a contributor
download openJDK
make the fix
ask any related questions on this list
submit a patch
we'll assign a sponsor who we'll review your fix
and put it back when it is done

The whole process will be simplified when we complete moving to 
Mercurial repository

For this RFE you don't need to file JSR
as you mentioned changes should as backward compatible as possible

but we'll need the request to the special committee which keeps track of 
the Java public API, the sponsor will do it for you

Please note that we prefer to make the incremental fixes which fix the 
particular problem, I mean, not to mix e.g. generifying and optimization
in one fix but split it to two ones.

 >I want my
 > progress to be visible by the public. So what is the best strategy? 
Work at
 > openjdk.org? Work at SwingLabs? Start a new project at java.net?

The current process doesn't seem to provide much visibility for the 
public. To make it visible I personally would do the following things:

- start a project on java.net
(not sure it helps for this particular case)
- blog about your progress and discuss it with the community
(this is the best way to make your work visible)

Thanks
alexp


> Hi,
> 
> I'm interessted in the RFE "6179357: Request interface 
> javax.swing.tree.TreeModel to have a generic type for nodes". Is there 
> already someone working on this issue? If not I would like to help there.
> 
> I want to address following issues:
> - add generics support to the Swing framework
> - provide support for new language features like varargs
> - provide better support for the collection framework
> - optimize code where reasonable
> 
> Do you think this is a good idea? How probable will such a change make its way 
> to the "official" jdk? 
> 
> I sent the signed SCA to Sun. So what would be the next steps? I want my 
> progress to be visible by the public. So what is the best strategy? Work at 
> openjdk.org? Work at SwingLabs? Start a new project at java.net?
> 
> Should I work on a branch of openjdk? Or should I copy the current revision to 
> a new repository? What is the easiest/ best way to get the source back to 
> openjdk?
> 
> Is a JSR needed for such a change? Note: the suggested changes should be 
> backwards compatible (eg. thanks to the "raw type feature" of generics), as 
> far as I can see up to now. (The only exception is of course reflection, 
> which can always break if you change an API). 
> 
> Thanks for your help.
> 
> -Florian