<Swing Dev> <AWT Dev>[9] ***POLL***: Closing sun.awt.shell

[Semyon Sadetsky]

Dear subscribers,

On behalf of Swing team I would like to start some kind of poll to 
gather your opinions what from sun.awt.shell.* classes is necessary for 
developers. Since with JDK 9 all sun.*
packages will be closed for developers.

Folders are platform specific objects which denotes OS resources like 
regular file system objects (files), network nodes, document libraries, 
recently used files lists, etc.
The internal class sun.awt.shell.ShellFolder contains generic folder 
methods and it is extendable to query platform specific folder features 
(currently implemented for Win32 only).
If any of your applications directly use ShellFolder that can make sense 
for you because with JDK9 such applications will stop to work. In JDK 
this class is only used to build javax.swing.JFileChooser dialog.

Currently sun.awt.shell.* is the only gateway in JDK for querying folder 
specific information from the native platform.
Briefly what the sun.awt.shell.* may provide:
- get folder nodes list how is it usually presented in the underling 
platform and the desktop top folder nodes list.
- determine if the file denotes link, shortcut, network device and 
convert them into the real paths.
- get OS specific folder types and attributes: icons, folder column 
titles,order and width, default sort order, etc.

Swing team got only one request ( 
https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8081722 ) from NetBeans team to 
support several ShellFolder methods for them. The purpose of the poll is 
to find out whether those several methods are enough, or other teems 
need to have a bit more methods to be opened, or it is worth to open a 
generic folder abstraction for extensive customizations by developers. 
All suggestions are welcome.

Thank you.
--Semyon

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