Project Onyx aims to provide blueprints for adding animation to Swing applications using the Trident animation engine. Onyx is a Swing RIA that connects to Amazon E-commerce backend and shows a list of albums for a specific performer. It is a pure Swing / Java2D application with only two dependencies – Trident and the classes generated by the wsimport tool from the Amazon E-commerce WSDL.

Over the next few entries i’m going to show code snippets that illustrate how Trident can be used to add simple and complex animations to your Swing applications. The full code is in the SVN repository, and here are a few videos that show the different parts of Onyx in action:

Fading in the main Onyx window, rollover animations on the close button and fading out the main window on disposing:

Asynchronously connecting to Amazon to fetch and display the list of albums, with fading and looping load progress animation, and smooth album scrolling:

Showing bigger album art and scrollable track listing in a separate window when an album is selected, complete with a complex scenario of showing the art and switching between the albums: