I am thrilled today to announce the availability of the final release for version 1.1 of Trident animation library (code-named Bogeyman). Most of the new functionality in this version was driven by the user feedback, and includes the following:

• Reworked fluent APIs to interpolate properties
• Configuration APIs to extend the core functionality of the library
• Specifying custom pulse source to drive timelines
• Working with custom property interpolators
• Extended support for animations in Java UI toolkits

In addition to the bundled sample applications, Trident has two blueprint projects. These projects show how to use Trident to drive complex animation scenarios in Internet-enabled rich applications that show graphic information on music albums. Project Onyx is the Swing implementation (see detailed walkthroughs), and Project Granite is the SWT implementation (see detailed walkthroughs).

If you have Java 7 installed on your machine, click the button below to launch the WebStart version of Project Onyx:

You are more than welcome to take Trident 1.1 for a ride and report any problems in the project mailing lists, forums or issue tracker.

While Trident requires Java 6 for both the compile and runtime, Emmanuel Bourg has shared his tips on what is required to compile and run version 1.1 of the library under Java 5 and Java 1.4 – complete with a patch for the relevant classes and the build script. While these tips are relevant for the current state of the codebase, Trident core may at any point switch to using Java 6 specific APIs if they are found to be beneficial to the development of the library.

Finally, release 1.1 has one known issue that was found a few hours before the final release was built. As the fix may potentially affect the stability of the library, i have decided to postpone it to the next release. The issue is with running looping timelines on Swing components. If a window hosting such a component is disposed, Trident will continue running the timeline. If the timeline results in updating visual properties of this component (directly or indirectly), the main AWT thread will never shut down – as described in the AWT threading documentation – and the VM will never quit. There are two workaround for this issue in version 1.1:

• Use EXIT_ON_CLOSE mode instead of DISPOSE_ON_CLOSE
• Override the Component.removeNotify of the relevant component and cancel / abort the timeline