Codename One 3.4

We are thrilled to announce the immediate availability of Codename One 3.4!

Version 3.4 brings with it refinement and stability as its core features, this is a trend that we are very pleased with and intend to carry on to version 3.5.

Notice that you should always install the latest release of Codename One thru https://www.codenameone.com/download.html

Highlights of this Release

• Rewritten documentation - the developer guide was written from the ground up and the JavaDocs were significantly improved
• IntelliJ IDEA Plugin rewrite - the new IntelliJ IDEA support is as good as the NetBeans plugin
• Shape Clipping - it is now possible to clip a graphics context based on an arbitrary shape
• ToastBar - allows posting "hints" visually to a hint area
• Toolbar is now the default & has a refined implementation/usage
• SignatureComponent - allows us to accept user signatures
• Gaussian Blur - supported on images and dialogs
• ParparVM - now has better performance in micro-benchmarks

You can see the full list of changes to Codename One in the github repository.

Lowlights

The following are things we are still working on or failed to bring to the front for this release. We are aware of them and are working on improving them:

• Demos - We were supposed to modernize our demos. Almost all of them still use Java 5 and old themes. None use the new material design icon fonts. This makes them feel antiquated, we hope to fix this early in the 3.5 cycle
• Windows port - We actually made great progress on this & also posted the full source code.
  Just yesterday we posted additional good news on the subject!
  However, it's still incomplete for release and needs quite a bit of work as it is a huge task. We are making a lot of progress though and we are optimistic that 3.5 could have UWP support.
• GUI Builder - This is the biggest failure of this release. One of our core goals was to get the GUI builder to production grade in 3.5 and we failed with that. It's much stabler but we can't call it 1.0 at this time...
  This is our highest priority right now. We will try to get the GUI builder to 1.0 well before 3.5 is ready and will hopefully release/announce it separately.

Onwards to 3.5

Besides the lowlights above which must be addressed, there are several other things we are looking at for 3.5:

• Java 8 all the way - we will make Java 8 into the default build mode. Once that is in order we will experiment
  with "only" Java 8 mode for newer builds.
  Assuming this will work we will switch to Java 8 thru our entire stack and Codename One builtin code will be able to use Java 8 language features.
• Videos & Even Better Docs - We will increase our video output now that our documentation has improved. We are still working on even better documentation than what we have right now. We're not ready for announcements yet but we have some interesting ideas
• We will continue the trend of using Codename One to build everything. This trend started with the
  certificate wizard which is one of our most popular features. It continued with the new GUI builder and preferences dialog for our IntelliJ IDEA support.

Schedule

Codename One 3.5 is scheduled for Tuesday August 2nd 2016. Version 3.6 is currently scheduled for December of
2016.