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

By Chet Haase and Romain Guy

Filthy Rich Clients refers to ultra-graphically rich applications that ooze cool. They suck the user in from the outset and hang on to them with a death grip of excitement. Filthy Rich Clients:... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0132413930
• ISBN13: 9780132413930
• Release Date: August 2007
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
• Length: 572 Pages
• Weight: 1.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 7.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Great book if you are stuck on the dull data grids

After years of programming swing data grid based applications. This book is more than a relief to read. The examples are really inspiring and are an invitation to experiment and apply them. I really learned a lot about the inner working of swing and the book kept me keen on performance. Applying animations and effects is not applicable in a lot of cases but is very good to know how to apply them when a chance comes by. For me this book is a must read if you like to program Java Swing applications.

EXCELLENT Learning Material

This book will save you hours of trouble shooting the little things that don't work as intuitively as they should in Java. I have not found an un-useful idea here. It also shows you how to make your application more efficient (faster). The author has already done the timing tests and offer you the results and the routes you should take. All in all, a fantastic find.

An excellent must have for J2SE

To push java's ui capabilities has in the past been a bit of a struggle due to the many ways of dealing with Swing, repaints, events, animation etc. This book is an absolute life saver in terms of presenting a unified best practice strategy for everything a ui developer would wish to do in java. It creates very simple applications with solid explanations of what the code is doing, from the low level to the high level. It is also written in a very personable style and the book moves easily and logically through the related material. I wish I had read this book 4 years ago.

Any advanced programming collection needs this.

Libraries that cater to Java programmers will find an excellent guide in FILTHY RICH CLIENTS, which refers to rich applications that teach how to build better, more effective desktop applications that enhance user experiences. Graphical and animated effects are the focus here, with a bow to performance: chapters teach how to create, customize and translate special effects with Filthy Rich Clients and come from a client architect of a Java group at Sun Microsystems. Any advanced programming collection needs this.

A fun and useful Java book

This is one of those "fun books" on Java that you used to see so much of in the 90's but are pretty much no longer written. This book is about building better desktop applications that employ interesting graphical and animated effects. This book was meant to be worked through from beginning to end, although if you are already familiar with the technology that does not mean you can't skip around. The book has plenty of code and some math. However, as in the example in the section on morphing, the book does not try to get into heavy-duty math. If there are open source libraries that do the trick, as there are in the case of morphing effects, the authors refer you to that library. They do explain math if all it involves is something on the level of fairly simple matrix algebra - blurring for example. The book is not a primer on Swing. It assumes the reader has experience in that area. However, some of the touchier aspects of Swing that may not be self-evident to even experienced Swing programmers are explained in the first couple of chapters of the book. In particular, the authors do a pretty good job of explaining how Swing and Java 2D work together, which is hard to find in books and even in online tutorials. Obviously, there is lots of code involved in such a book, and although there are snippets in the book to the point that you can understand what's going on, you'll want to go to the book's website at O'Reilly & Associates and download the whole thing so you can study it and play with it. The book is divided into four parts as follows: Part I - Graphics and GUI Fundamentals Not a fundamental tutorial on building GUI's in Java, it points out the stuff you need to get up to speed with the APIs and techniques that later parts of the book build upon. Chapter 1. Desktop Java Graphics APIs: Swing, AWT, and Java 2D Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT); Java 2D; Swing; Chapter 2. Swing Rendering Fundamentals Events; Swing Painting; Swing Rendering; Double-Buffering; Threading; Chapter 3. Graphics Fundamentals Java 2D; Rendering; Chapter 4. Images Image Types; BufferedImage; Image Scaling; Chapter 5. Performance Use the Clip; Compatible Images; Managed Images; Intermediate Images; Optimal Primitive Rendering; Benchmark ;Command-Line Flags; Part II - Advanced Graphics Rendering Continues looking at Java 2D and Swing. The first pat talks about composites, gradients, and image processing support in Java. The second part talks about Swing components that support graphical applications - the glass pane, layered panes, and the repaint manager. Chapter 6. Composites AlphaComposite; AlphaComposite: The 12 Rules; Creating and Setting Up an AlphaComposite; Common Uses of AlphaComposite; Issues with AlphaComposite; Create Your Own Composite; Summary; Chapter 7. Gradients Two-Stops Linear Gradient; Special Effects with Regular Gradients; Multistops Linear Gradient; Radial Gradient; Optimizing Gradients; Chapter 8. Image Processing Image Filters; Proces