Romain Guy

Cool Utility Classes For SwingX

Sunday, October 22nd, 2006 at 4:59 am, Swing.
Written by Romain Guy

If you liked the user interface of Artemis, you might probably want to be able to produce the same result at no cost. I have good news for you then because I have just added a set of cool classes to SwingX that will help you generate nice-looking graphical effects.

The new classes are available in three packages:

• org.jdesktop.swingx.geom
  • Morphing2D: Morphes a Java2D shape into another (written by Jim Graham from Sun Microsystems)
  • Star2D: A star shape that can be used to create Web 2.0-like badges and icons
• org.jdesktop.swingx.graphics
  • BlendComposite: A set of 30+ blending modes for Java2D painting (as found in Photoshop or The GIMP)
  • ColorUtilities: A set of utility methods to manipulate colors
  • GraphicsUtilities: A set of utility methods to create and load compatible images and create thumbnails
  • ReflectionRenderer: Generates reflections from pictures
  • ShadowRenderer: Generates shadows from pictures
• org.jdesktop.swingx.image
  • AbstractFilter: A basic implementation of BufferedImageOp to easily create new image filters
  • ColorTintFilter: This filters applies a color to an image to tint it
  • FastBlurFilter: A box blur filter
  • StackBlurFilter: This filter approximates the result of a gaussian blur by applying several FastBlurFilter to an image

All these classes come from the SwingLabs incubator. Some of them have been available for quite a while now (ShadowRenderer used to be called ShadowFactory) but have been vastly improved. I have written the javadoc of all those classes but I have also created demos for the most important features. The demos source code is available in the incubator, in the fx/ sub-project but I have some WebStart versions for you!

Blending

Blur

Morphing

Reflections

Shadows

Go grab the latest source code from SwingX's CVS and tell me what you think of those tools!

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