Project Granite aims to provide blueprints for adding animation to SWT applications using the Trident animation engine. Granite is an SWT RIA that connects to Amazon E-commerce backend and shows a list of albums for a specific performer. It is a pure SWT application with three dependencies – Trident, classes generated by the wsimport tool from the Amazon E-commerce WSDL and Eclipse Jobs library for performing networking tasks on background threads.

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 SWT applications. The full code is in the SVN repository, and here are two videos that show the different parts of Granite in action.

Asynchronously connecting to Amazon to fetch and display the list of albums, with fading and looping load progress animation, smooth album scrolling, showing bigger album art / track listing in a separate window and switching between different albums:

Looping scrolling of the album track listing, pausing at the end of each cycle to allow easier reading: