Gluon Mobile 5.0.0

The Gluon engineering team is proud to announce the release of Gluon Mobile 5.0.0, as well as updated versions of our Gluon IDE plugins for IntelliJ IDEA, NetBeans, and Eclipse. As stated in our earlier announcement, the primary focus of this release has been to simplify Gluon Mobile APIs. With this, we are also releasing updates to Glisten Afterburner.

Overview

Gluon Mobile is a full client-side solution for writing high performance, cross-device mobile applications purely in the Java programming language. Gluon Mobile is made up of many layers, and so we have made simultaneous releases of many of these layers, including the UI layer (Gluon Mobile Glisten), the DI application framework (Gluon Mobile Afterburner), the hardware abstraction layer (Gluon Mobile Charm Down), and the IDE plugins.

For reference, the table below shows the version numbers of these sub-components in the Gluon Mobile 5.0.0 release:

Gluon Mobile Glisten

This major release contains a lot of new features, bug fixes and API changes. For a complete list of changes, please check our release notes. Some notable changes made to this release are:

• Support for the notch in iPhone X devices.
• Significantly improved and simplified life cycle management in Layers.
• A universal NavigationDrawer accessed via MobileApplication, just like AppBar.
• NavigationDrawer has been improved to automatically show and hide without the need to add it to a SidePopupView.
• Transitions support custom duration.
• A new Transition called MobileTransition which automatically pauses and resumes animation along with the change in the life-cycle of the mobile application.
• A brand new control Snackbar which replaces SnackbarPopupView.
• AutoCompleteTextField has a new converter for easy conversions between strings and objects.

Gluon Mobile Charm Down

After releasing Gluon Mobile Charm Down 3.6.0 on 15th August, 2017, we have been continuously improving Charm Down as an effort for Gluon Mobile 5.0.0. We made a couple of releases in between to finally reach 3.8.0 being released with 5.0.0. For a complete list of changes, please check our release notes.

Here is a list of some features added to Charm Down since the 3.6.0 release:

• DisplayService can return return the visual bounds using getDefaultDimensions().
• Barcode Scan service supports title, legend and result text.
• PicturesService supports returning the Image file.
• Support to start and stop PositionService.
• Notch API in DisplayService to support mobile devices with notches like iPhone X.

Gluon Mobile Afterburner

Many applications can benefit by using Dependecy Injection. Gluon Mobile Afterburner is a small framework that sits on top of Gluon Mobile Glisten, which takes advantage of the Afterburner DI library developed by Adam Bien. This library consists of literally three classes, and so is incredibly easy to use. Gluon Mobile Afterburner uses Afterburner to provide even simpler API for mobile applications:

• Dependency injection in controllers.
• Simplified view flow definition.
• Automatic creation of the Menu drawer, based on view definition.
• ….and much more.

DefaultDrawerManager has been removed as most of its work is already patched into NavigationDrawer. A new Utils class has been added with buildDrawer() to add header and items from the list of AppViews, into the drawer.

Upgrading to Gluon Mobile 5.0.0

For all users of Gluon Mobile, we have created a migration guide to help you work through the process.

To make things easier, we have already upgraded all our samples to Gluon Mobile 5.0.0. For each of these samples you can see the revision history in GitHub necessary to bring them up on Gluon Mobile 5.0.0.

If you have any questions that are not answered there, we recommend that you in the first instance consult our support page, and in particular the Stack Overflow link. If you cannot find an answer there (or are not keen to ask a question there), then please reach out to us via email.

Summary

Gluon continues to invest heavily into developing the very best Java-on-mobile and end-to-end Java offering for enterprises. Our Gluon Mobile library enables and rapidly accelerates the deployment of Java applications on mobile devices, and our Gluon CloudLink offering enables simplified connectivity and synchrnoziation, security, management, and access to enterprise backends. We encourage you to explore the Gluon product offerings, and to also consider our expert engineering team when you next need custom consultancy for enterprise Java development (be it JavaFX, Java SE, or Java EE).