Intro.md

Components - introduction

Most of Radiance's components are created as projections. Projections are built from content models and presentation models.

A content model describes the basic elements of a piece of your model realm, how the user interacts with it, and what happens when that interaction happens.

A presentation model describes how to "convert" (or project) that content model into a Swing component that can be added to the application UI hierarchy to present the data backed by that content model and react to the user interaction.

A projection is the act of "combining" a content model and a presentation model and creating a Swing component.

In a nutshell:

• content model + presentation model → projection
• projection → one or more Swing components

Example

Let's take a look at these three concepts in action:

Here is how the first button (big icon with "Paste" text underneath) is created:

Command pasteActionCommand = Command.builder()
    .setText(resourceBundle.getString("Paste.text"))
    .setExtraText(resourceBundle.getString("Paste.textExtra"))
    .setIconFactory(Edit_paste.factory())
    .build();

CommandButtonProjection bigPasteProjection =
      pasteActionCommand.project(
            CommandButtonPresentationModel.builder()
                    .setPresentationState(CommandButtonPresentationState.BIG)
                    .setBackgroundAppearanceStrategy(RadianceThemingSlices.BackgroundAppearanceStrategy.ALWAYS)
                    .build());

JCommandButton bigButton = bigPasteProjection.buildComponent();

First, we create a Command which is a content model. It sets text, extra text and icon factory as the basic elements that describe this piece of application model realm.

Then we construct a CommandButtonPresentationModel which is a presentation model. It specifies that we want to use the BIG presentation state (big icon + one or two lines of text underneath), and BackgroundAppearanceStrategy.ALWAYS appearance (button background always showing).

Then, we combine them together by calling Command.project(CommandButtonPresentationModel) that gives us a CommandButtonProjection.

And finally, we call CommandButtonProjection.buildComponent() that gives us a JCommandButton - a Swing component that can be added to the component hierarchy of our application.

Next

Continue to a more detailed sample walkthrough.