Performance

New Class: UIDefaults.UIDefaultProxy, Related Performance Changes
One of the main reasons that Swing's startup performance was slower than desired was that as soon as any component requires a UI delegate, the UIManager loads a look and feel, which results in loading a defaults table which includes defaults for UIs for all component classes.
In previous releases, we mistakenly believed that instance creation should be avoided, and so we delayed instance creation by creating anonymous implementations of LazyValue, an interface which acts as a lightweight proxy that only creates its instance the first time it is retrieved from the defaults table.
Performance analysis for Kestrel indicates that we were wrong in believing that instance creation was the determining factor. In fact, the overwhelming factor contributing to delay and increased footprint in this area was classloading, which was ironically not helped by our creation of lots of anonymous interface implementations!
The general approach taken to fix this was to define a concrete LazyValue implementation in UIDefaults.java which uses reflection to create its proxied instance when asked to do so. This class is called UIDefaultProxy. As a result only one class is loaded, and about 90 other classloads could be avoided in a Hello World example.
See: UIDefaults.UIDefaultProxy
In the course of replacing the existing anonymous LazyValue implementations and identifying other classloads that could be avoided, we came across several classes and accessor methods which were incorrectly package private. Since the UIDefaultProxy is in the javax.swing package, and most of the uses are in javax.swing.plaf.* packages, these signatures needed to be changed so that they could be used by the proxy.
The following is a list of these:
javax.swing.plaf.basic.BasicBorders
public static Border getSplitPaneDividerBorder()
javax.swing.plaf.metal.MetalBorders
public static class PaletteBorder public static Border getButtonBorder() public static Border getTextBorder() public static Border getTextFieldBorder() static class ToggleButtonBorder extends ButtonBorder public static Border getToggleButtonBorder()
public static Border getDesktopIconBorder()
javax.swing.plaf.metal.MetalIconFactory public static Icon getCheckBoxIcon() public static class PaletteCloseIcon implements Icon, UIResource, Serializable

Please send comments to: swing-feedback@java.sun.com. This is not a subscription list.

Java Software