MIME Browser & Star Chess Updated

Following the recent release of Java SE 8 Update 40, I’ve updated my two open-source projects that currently use JavaFX to its latest version: MIME Browser 1.3.2 and Star Chess 2.0.1. In both cases, I replaced my homespun exception dialogs and message boxes with calls to the new dialog API.

There were also a few other changes. First, I noticed that the TextAreas in which MIME Browser showed MIME envelope fields no longer reliably shrank to a single row. That’s because TextArea always reserves space for a horizontal scrollbar, even when that scrollbar is hidden, and the reserved space is nearly as tall as an entire text row. I’ve filed JIRA report RT-40265 on this issue which is currently scheduled to be fixed in Java SE 9.

Meanwhile, I’ve switched the MIME envelope fields to TextField which cannot have scrollbars but does allow users to scroll through its contents using the normal text cursor. That works even if editing is disabled… but then the text cursor is invisible! I’ve filed another JIRA report, RT-40264, on that weirdness. For now the fields are editable so as to make the text cursor visible, but changing the field contents has no lasting effect.

Lastly, Star Chess revealed that the various small patches WebView had been receiving did result in one functional change: the ancient HTML frame set mechanism is no longer supported. It’s long obsolete anyway, but I had still used this technique to show a table of contents within help pages. Now I’ve finally switched to dynamically loading the ToC into an HTML div using jQuery’s Ajax support.

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