Simon Morris's Blog: February 2007 Archive

I recently watched the interesting Screencast by Adobe's James Ward, entitled "Web 2.0 Design Trend & Tools". It shows off some of the stuff Adobe are doing with Flash and Flex to make them better suited for the Rich Internet Applications space, and I have to say I found what I saw quite impressive.

RIA's seem to be the buzzword of the moment, now that the shine has started to come off Ajax. Developers are starting to ask why they can't have the power of a desktop interface, coupled with the convenience of a web app. And while Adobe has recently bolstered its animation centric technology with data handling capabilities, Sun has been busy beefing up Java's desktop and graphics support.

But the one thing that Swing still lacks is eye candy. Swishy, bouncy, scrolly stuff. Now personally I can't stand it. The first thing I do when faced with a fresh install of Windows is to switch off the GUI effects (although, paradoxically, I actually quite like the OS X effects!) But the Flex demo got me wondering: just how easy would it be to add swishy, bouncy, scrolly stuff to a standard Swing GUI?

Throughout the first part of the Flex demo there's a tab bar with a subtle animation effect, and I figured it would be interesting to find out just how much work is actually involved in duplicating this kind of effect in Swing. Then I thought "sod it, in for a penny, in for a pound" — why not just turn the eye candy knob right up to eleven, and go all out for as much bling as I could possibly manage without reaching for a sick bag?

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