Comments on: Introducing Trident – animation library for Java applications

By: Tom

Tom — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 12:06:00 +0000

Understood.

By: Kirill Grouchnikov

Kirill Grouchnikov — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:53:34 +0000

Tom,

Trident is an animation framework for Java applications, not only for Swing applications. It only provides a timeline engine to schedule and follow timelines and timeline scenarios. It does not have any rendering capabilities (a-la SceneGraph or Swash).

My natural inclination is to use Java2D / Swing for the demoes, but the rendering is in the test applications, not in Trident.

You can create timelines / timeline scenarios on any Java object, even in a headless mode.

Thanks
Kirill

By: Tbee

Tbee — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:16:53 +0000

Is trident running 100% within Swing (as in: you animate jcomponents) or does it have it own canvas? I only see Java2D stuff being animated in the video’s.

By: Sebastian

Sebastian — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 22:03:01 +0000

Hi Kirill,

nice to see that your industrious nature produced yet another wonderful library (also, it’s nice that you put it under a liberal license – GPL essentially means that a piece of software is a no go for the project I am currently working in).

Best regards,
S.

By: Rémy Rakic

Rémy Rakic — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 17:47:32 +0000

@gili no you can’t, using something under the gpl means you have to license your code under a compatible license (which depends on the version of the gpl, so google will get you a complete list)

scenario 1.0+ is not gpl however, only the svn/0.6 is.

when/if javafx is opensourced, i think they’ll add the classpath exception to the gpl, which will allow the use case you describe.

By: Jeanette Winzenburg

Jeanette Winzenburg — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 15:58:45 +0000

Kirill,

as to animating properties of a renderer: the SwingX way of achieving that is to animate the properties of Highlighter/s (with whatever animation framework). Combined with the built-in per-cell rollover notification should handle arbitrarily complex scenarios.

Jeanette

By: Gili

Gili — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 15:23:55 +0000

Chet,

Is it legal to use a GPL-licensed Scenario in a commercial product so long as you don’t modify the library itself? Or does the license require me to GPL my product as well?

Thank you,
Gili

By: Patrick Wright

Patrick Wright — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 13:23:42 +0000

Hi Kirill

Did you happen to look at Swash (https://swash.dev.java.net/, docs at http://wiki.java.net/bin/view/Javadesktop/Swash) while developing Trident?

Patrick

By: Java Desktop links of the week, February 16th | Jonathan Giles

Java Desktop links of the week, February 16th | Jonathan Giles — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 19:35:03 +0000

[...] look and feel project, his Flamingo components project (including Ribbon component) and the new release of an animation library called Trident, which evolved out of his work for [...]

By: Kirill Grouchnikov

Kirill Grouchnikov — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 19:18:14 +0000

Chet,

I think that the design of any library should be driven not only by the purity of its API and applicability to generic objects, but also by real-life simple *and* complex scenarios. Interpolating FG / BG colors of cell renderers in Swing is one example of such a complex scenario, where varying the values of a renderer is not good enough when it is used in multiple cells.

And by the way, Trident’s timelines are not specific to Component / JComponent and can be used on any Java objects. The circles / rectangles in the first demo are one example of that.

Thanks
Kirill