java - Grouping animations for sequential execution

Question

I have a Swing program that executes 2D animations using Swing Timers. With each button click there are several timers created to animate several different components - some of them moving off the screen and others moving on. (I do not know ahead of time what animations will need to be executed with each button click, but it isnt a problem to distinguish between the two "types" of animations at runtime - they're initiated from different methods, and thus its easy to imagine adding them to two different "queues" - a queue of outgoing items and a queue of incoming items. Having done so, I could then implement the basic strategy of calling a

That said - that all only makes sense to me intuitively, heuristically - I haven't figured out how to implement it in practice. What would those "queues" actually be, and what class would hold and later execute them?? Presumably one that implements Runnable, creating a second thread that can execute the animations with tighter control on how they proceed? Or does the event-dispatch thread give me the ample control here: Is there a way to use SwingUtilities.invokeAndWait() (or something like it) to collect all the animations to be performed, while assigning priority to those of a certain class, or that are marked in a certain way?

Answer 1

I would suggest taking a look at the design of some of the existing animation engines like:

• The Timing Framework
• Trident
• The Universal Tween Engine and AurelienRibon / sliding-layout which uses the Tween Engine.

Generally what these engines tend to do is have a central "clock" which ticks at a regular interval. They then provide callback functionality to notify interested parties that a "tick" has occured.

They then offer a series of layers on top of this concept to make it easier to interact with, such as providing a time range for animations, presented as a percentage over time (rather than a physical time measurement), which can be used to calculate fractions of change.

The also provide interpolation, allowing you to affect the speed of the animation through the time cycle (such as slow in, fast out effects).

This approach reduces the overhead of having to have multiple Timers running, which may reduce the performance over time while, providing a separation model, so each "animation" is it's own entity.

Personally, I'd evaluate each one and see which best meets your needs and run with, but if you really want to do it yourself, they provide a good starting point for ideas and designs