Filthy Rich Clients: Developing Animated and Graphical Effects for Desktop Java™ Applications

Chapter 3. Graphics Fundamentals

ONE of the things that makes Swing such a great platform for Filthy Rich Clients is its ability to have customized rendering for a GUI component, which allows alterations of a component’s appearance. Swing’s ability to have customized rendering is made richer by its use of Java 2D, the rendering layer of Desktop Java. We explore important elements of Java 2D in this chapter, specifically talking about the most important concepts of Java 2D rendering as they relate to Filthy Rich Clients.

Java 2D

Whenever I give a presentation on Java 2D, I do a quick poll to see how many people use this library. Typically, about 10 to 20 percent of the people raise their hands. Then I ask how many people use Swing, and most of ...