Splash Screen

If it's gonna take a while to start up our Swing app, then we probably wanna display a splash screen.

It's easy with Java6 - just add a -splash command-line option.

Code Snippet

We initialise a SplashScreen instance and get its Graphics2D as follows.

public class SplashTest {
    static Logger logger = Logger.getLogger(SplashTest.class.getSimpleName());
    final SplashScreen splash = SplashScreen.getSplashScreen();
    Rectangle splashBounds;
    Graphics2D splashGraphics;
    
    protected void initSplash() throws Exception {
        if (splash == null) {
            throw new Exception("no splash image specified eg. -splash:mysplash.png");
        }
        splashBounds = splash.getBounds();
        splashGraphics = (Graphics2D) splash.createGraphics();
        ...
    }
    
    protected void updateSplash(String status, int progress) {
        if (splash == null) return;
        drawSplash(splashGraphics, status, progress);
        splash.update();
    }
    ...
}    

where in drawSplash() we draw a progress bar ourselves over the splash image using the Graphics2D instance.