Janice J. Heiss's Blog

A Cool MP3 Player at the SwingLabs Exhibit

I’m at Exhibit #1111, Swing/Labs JDesktop Network Components (JDNC). It’s a Sun Microsystems project that allows experimentation with extensions to existing Java Foundation Classes/Swing API components, new JFC/Swing components and various desktop related technologies like Java 2D, AWT. I’m talking now with Sun’s Roman Guy, who explains, “We experiment with a number of projects containing JDNC and Swing components, all of which sit on top of Swing and add extra features, like transparency or animation. There are data-aware components that make it very easy to find data from a database or an XML file, directly to the UI. You have almost nothing to do -- everything is done for you in the code. You just choose the source of code and – that’s it.”

The source code is available on java.net, (http://www.java.net/) as part of the LGPL license. The idea is to explore new ideas in Swing components that may one day be part of the JDK, like various filtering, highlighting and searching features. “It’s a playground for the Swing team,” explains Guy.

Next to Roman, is Sun’s Richard Bair, operating a SwingLabs desktop network component demo, who explains, “We’ve created a music player that reads the music libraries of a very popular music player and will play any MP3 file that you have in your library. The interesting thing we’ve done is show off some of the cool features in our Swing X project, especially the data binding. First, you see the finished project, a nice music player with ‘play,’ ‘previous,’ and ‘next’ buttons and a search field. We have a lot of music and custom cell renderers and so on. On Thursday, June 30, this will go public as: joplin.dev.java.net – Joplin, as in Scott Joplin, is the name of our music player. We have a list of music and a collapsible panel -- you click a button and the music screen comes down as an animated effect. As you select different songs, you notice that the title, album, and artist genre info get updated.”

The screen displays a cool album cover.

“It looks fancy for a demo, but a lot of it is stock components from the Swing X project we put to use here,” says Richard. “We have a JX image panel component, which is nothing more than a component that knows how to extract the image art from an MP3. It’s pretty simple stuff. This table is a normal JX table and a little browser that lets you walk in 3D through all of the album covers in your music library. It’s all implemented in Java 2D, very fast. Once you get your song, you can listen to it. Another screen was written in Java 2D, we call Zoomy; this panel can be retrieved from another open source project on java.net that is called ping.dev.java.net. A search field enables you to filter by artist, album, genre and song. This will be part of James Gosling’s keynote on Thursday.”

Great work! Let’s hope it finds its way into the JDK. And don’t forget Gosling’s Thursday morning keynote.

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