Kirill Grouchnikov's Blog

Bringing life to Swing desktop applications - teaser 1

If you happen to be at this year's JavaOne, you're more than welcome to hear me and Alex presenting the Bringing Life to Swing Desktop Applications technical session (TS-3414). We will be talking about different techniques to bring your Swing application into the 21st century. The application that we've written to illustrate all of the techniques will be available immediately after our session, and here's a sneak peek at two of the effects combined in it (ghost effects and transition layout). Note that during the transitions (when the icons are zoomed in / out), the sliding icons are made translucent to make the transition look better. How many lines of code were added to the application to enable these effects? Three.

See you at JavaOne.

Comments

• That's nice, I like the shuffling.

  Posted by: bugfaceuk on April 25, 2007 at 12:41 AM

• Cool- is the component displaying the icons a JList or something else? Have you given any thought to how the component will perform if there are several thousand icons to display? For example, you wouldn't want to have to load and keep thousands of images in memory at once. But you also wouldn't want to have to load the icon each time the cell is rendered, since that would be extremely expensive and unecessary. It is almost like you'd want some sort of weak reference to the images so that they could be disposed once they are no longer displayed.

  Posted by: bwy on April 26, 2007 at 04:12 PM

• Cool. In my opinion, these effects should be part of a L&F theme so that I don't have to thing about it and just enjoy the effects. Is that possible?

  Posted by: imjames on April 26, 2007 at 11:09 PM

• imjames - these specific effects already are (for quite some time). Follow the links to read more or wait for J1 to see the complete source code of this application.

  Posted by: kirillcool on April 26, 2007 at 11:12 PM

• Wow !

  This is pretty cool,
  I want more effects !
  :-)

  alexp

  Posted by: alexfromsun on April 29, 2007 at 04:04 AM

• 很不错，Very Good!

  Posted by: zengxiaohui on May 10, 2007 at 09:01 PM

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.