Holiday fun...

 Aloha and a happy new year...

I took the first week of 2022 off and because I love coding I was looking for something that I might add to one of my libraries.

It was not too hard to find something interesting and I decided to give it a try...the Radial Tidy Tree...

For those of you that have no idea what I am talking about...here is a little example from the web...

It is a tree structure that is visualized using a radial layout.

Looks like a fun thing to do but it really gave me some time to get it right. First of all (as nearly always) I had no real use case for it but just wanted to be able to create a chart like that.

So I decided to simply visualize a year. The root node has 4 child nodes, the 4 quarters and each quarter has 3 child nodes, the months of each quarter. Finally each month has it's specific number of days.

That's not real useful data but at least you can use it to create a Radial Tidy Tree. In principle it looks like an easy task but there are some things that are not that easy to solve. 

First of all you have to create the tree structure which is easy using my TreeNode class which I already used for the Sunburst chart. For this one I had to add more properties to it like x, y and angle. Thanks to the java.time package the creation of the tree was easy.

I won't show all the code here but if you like you can simply head over to github and check it out there...

The really tricky part was figuring out the angle step between the items on each level and I tried different approaches before I finally found a way that worked for me. 

Once I was able to place the items in the right place the next thing was to create all the bezier curves between the items to make it look good. And the last step was to put the text in the right position and rotate it correctly.

Well...long story short...here is the result...

And I really like the way the result looks :)

As I already mentioned, I do not have a real use case for it and therefor I cannot guarantee that the tree will work for all use cases. But I did a few other tests and it seems to be ok.

The RadialTidyTree can be found in the latest release of my charts library (17.1.2) which you can either get on github or on maven central.

As with all the charts in my charts library you can find a class that shows how to use it in the test package, for this one just look for RadialTidyTreeTest.java.

And that's it...so keep coding... :)

Harmony...finally

 Aloha,

When you create different libraries and components you find yourself writing the same code in different places over time. In principle that's ok, except you combine those libraries and components. In this case you suddenly have the same classes twice or even more often in your code base. When I started creating Medusa, TilesFX and Charts I did not really think about the possibility to combine those libraries in one project at some point in the future. The main reason for this is that I never plan to create those libraries but they simply grow from components to libraries over time. 

The thing that started me thinking about to re-use more code between those libraries was a project where I needed TilesFX and Charts in the same project. Both of these libraries came with a Country class with different properties and methods. Now in that project I needed both of them and I needed to write some ugly code to convert between them

That was the starting point of the Countries library which you can now find either on github and on maven central.

But then I saw that there are other classes that I more or less use in both libraries and I decided to put those shared classes in a separate project. Because there are projects that use JavaFX and others which don't, I decided to create two projects:

• eu.hansolo.toolbox
• eu.hansolo.toolboxfx

Toolbox:

This library contains the code from my Evt project, meaning to say an event system which is similar to the JavaFX events.

Then I also added the code from my Properties project to the Toolbox. The properties are very similar to the JavaFX properties incl. binding. And in the Toolbox they will use the Evt events for property changes.

There are now also tuples in the Toolbox which sometimes can come in handy. They are not that fancy and their getters and setters do look like getA(), get(B) and setA(), setB(). Not so nice but useful.

The last thing I've added is the code from my UnitConverter which contains all kinds of different units and a converter that can convert between them (in the same category e.g. Temperature).

Then there is a Helper method that contains all sorts of methods that I use here and there in my code e.g. clamp() etc.

ToolboxFX:

Then there is the ToolboxFX library which depends on JavaFX but that does not only contain JavaFX related stuff. Here you will find things like my ConicalGradient, FontMetrix, GradientLookup, the Fonts that I do use often and other stuff like Point, Bounds, CornerRadii, Dimension, Location Po, CatmullRom etc.

ToolboxFX depends on Toolbox so you need to add Toolbox too if you use ToolboxFX.

This is stuff that I use a lot in the Charts library but also in TilesFX and Medusa.

But that's not enough, I've also separated the HeatMap from Charts and Countries and put it in a separate project.

So what does that mean for you as a user of one of my libraries?

• Update your dependencies
• TilesFX depends on:
• eu.hansolo:toolbox:17.0.6
• eu.hansolo:toolboxfx:17.0.15
• eu.hansolo.fx:heatmap:17.0.3
• eu.hansolo.fx:countries:17.0.16
• Medusa depends on:
• eu.hansolo:toolbox:17.0.6
• eu.hansolo:toolboxfx:17.0.15
• Charts depends on:
• eu.hansolo:toolbox:17.0.6
• eu.hansolo:toolboxfx:17.0.15
• eu.hansolo.fx:heatmap:17.0.3
• eu.hansolo.fx:countries:17.0.16
• Use the new event system
• If you make use of things like TileEvent, you should change to TileEvt etc. The best way to see how it works is to take a look at the Demo classes within the library source code.

ATTENTION: The libraries are not backwards compatible due to the new event system !!!

The new versions of TilesFX, Charts and Medusa that will make use of the shared libraries will all start with version 17.1.0. There is still a lot of stuff to streamline (e.g. removing methods from the libraries Helper classes because they are already covered by Helper  in Toolbox and HelperFX in ToolboxFX but for that I need more time.

So here are all libraries that are new or have changed:

• Toolbox
• ToolboxFX
• HeatMap
• Countries
• Medusa (jdk17 branch)
• Charts (jdk 17 branch)
• TilesFX (jdk 17 branch)

I will probably also use the Toolbox and ToolboxFX in future components and libraries.

So that was my holiday project and I'm really happy with it because now I could more easily use combinations of my libraries in projects.

I'm pretty sure there are still some things that do not work correctly, so please, if you stumble upon a problem do not hesitate to file an issue with some example code in the github repo.

I wish all of you a Happy New Year...and hopefully we will get rid of that Covid thing pretty soon...so stay healthy...and keep coding...