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

Introduction

This is not a book on data binding.¹

Rich Clients

We should describe what we mean by Filthy Rich Clients. But first, we need to describe what rich clients are. Rich clients is a phrase commonly associated with desktop applications. Rich client applications are usually contrasted with thin client or Web client applications, which are essentially software applications running on the server with a simple front end that runs in a browser on the user’s desktop.

Rich client applications have more of the program logic and functionality local to the user’s desktop machine. On one extreme, the application may be all local, such as a word-processing application or photo-editing software. Or the application may run in the client-server world, ...