Filthy Rich Clients: A Subtle Teaser

Romain Guy and I are nearing the end of a book on Swing, Java 2D, animation, and how to write better, and cooler, Swing applications. It's called Filthy Rich Clients.  I know we haven't mentioned it before, except for here, and here, and here, and here, and then here. And there's always here, and here, and then here. We've obviously been pretty quiet about it.

Now the book is actually nearing completion; we have just a tad more writing to go (right, Romain?), some more editing, then some more editing, and reviews, and then editing, and some more reviews, and then we'll probably want to edit it some more. And theoretically, all of this gets done in time to publish for JavaOne 2007 (second week of May).

So I thought I'd take a quick break from editing Chapter 12 (a fun chapter about a really cool utility ... which I have to completely rewrite in the next 2 days) and post the outline, now that we're fairly sure what it'll be:

Part I: Graphics and GUI Fundametals

1. Desktop Java Graphics APIs: Swing, Java 2D, and AWT
2. Swing Rendering Fundamentals
3. Graphics Fundamentals
4. Images
5. Advanced Graphics Rendering
6. Advanced Swing Rendering
7. Performance

Part II: Animation

8. Animation Fundamentals
9. Smooth Moves
10. Timing Framework: Fundamentals
11. Timing Framework: Advanced

Part III: Effects

12. Animated Transitions
13. Static Effects
14. Dynamic Effects
15. Wrap-Up

At least, that's our take on it before the reviewers rip it apart.

It should be a fun, and hopefully quite useful, book.  The first section, Part I, is fairly huge and is intended to be educational to a broad audience about how Swing and Java 2D do what they do and how you can take advantage of various features for richer applications. So while the whole book is oriented toward making-Swing-apps-cooler, there is a lot of material in there that is also intended to simply help Swing programmers understand Swing better. Lots of code. Lots of screenshots. Occasional math equations just to act a little crazy.

Now, back to my dark little editing corner....