In Chet Haase and Romain Guy's " Filthy Rich Clients: Developing Animated and Graphical Effects for Desktop Java Applications ", a 'filthy rich client' is described as "a term that we coined to refer to applications that are so graphically rich that they ooze cool. They suck users in from the outset and hang onto them with a death grip of excitement. They make users tell their friends about the applications. In short, they make users actually enjoy their application experience."

Then the authors continue by discussing the graphical and animated effects that lie at the heart of their book. The techniques they have developed apply very specifically to the programming environment of Java and Swing. One application that is grounded in that environment is NetBeans IDE . The beauty of NetBeans IDE in the context of 'filthy rich clients' is that it can be extended via plugins. Hence, to turn NetBeans IDE truly into a filthy rich client is completely possible, by creating plugins that leverage the techniques that Chet and Romain describe.

In the screenshot below are two examples that illustrate this point:

First, in the lower part of the screen, above, one sees a magnifying glass, in a separate JLayeredPane , as described in chapter 10 of the book. In the upper part, a custom layout manager, called StackLayout , is used to add a component bearing a photo to the top or the bottom of the stack, creating the illusion of depth. Both these samples come straight from the Filthy Rich Client site, where all 82 samples discussed in the book are found.

But how useful are these techniques? Or are they just pretty? And don't they slow down the performance of the application? Well, unsurprisingly, the answer to all these questions is: "That depends." The book provides ample warnings of the danger of throwing in meaningless special effects. In addition, threading, for example, is discussed in quite some detail, and many techniques are provided for ensuring that the special effects and animations do not negatively impact performance or the user's general experience of the application.

In the next part, we will look at one example in a little bit of detail, in the context of NetBeans IDE. We will use the example from chapter 9 in the book, to make use of NetBeans IDE's glass pane to simulate a download experience. When the user selects a menu item in NetBeans IDE, NetBeans IDE's glass pane will be shown, greying out the entire surface of the application, and showing a progress bar on top of it. Does NetBeans IDE have a glass pane? Yes of course. It is really just another Swing application!

Update: Continue to part 2 or part 3 .