I am thrilled today to announce the availability of the final release for version 1.0 of Trident animation library for Java applications (code-named Acumen).  Trident aims to simplify the development of rich animation effects in Java based UI applications, addressing both simple and complex scenarios – and you can read the available documentation in the project Wiki.

The current published API set follows the “simplicity before generality” approach. Trident is a continuation of the internal animation engine that has been part of the Substance look-and-feel for the last two years. Extracting it to a standalone library was accompanied by a significant overhaul of the API facets to:

• Provide a shallow learning curve
• Address real world use cases

It is very easy to start with Trident. To add animations to your application, simply create a timeline, configure it to change a value of some property and play it. From here, you can go progressively deeper towards the more powerful – and the more complex – Trident APIs:

• Adding more properties to interpolate
• Specifying intermediate values during the interpolation
• Controlling the rate of the property interpolation
• Listening to lifecycle events of timelines
• Creating parallel and sequential timeline scenarios
• Creating staged timeline scenarios
• Creating timeline scenarios with arbitrary dependencies

At each level you get more control over the animations – as you get more comfortable with what Trident can do to address the animation requirements of your application.

During the development of this version i have created a number of simple and more advanced examples using Trident. These examples have driven the current shape of Trident APIs. The simple examples include animating the foreground color of a button, showing an indeterminate progress indication, emulating fireworks and Matrix rain. In addition, Amber and Onyx are more complicated applications that integrate animation scenarios into UIs that fetch and display information from the web-based backend services – such as Digg, Twitter and Amazon. These examples strive to be the blueprints for using Trident in Java applications.

If i had to choose three features that bring the most functionality to interested applications, those would be:

• Timeline scenarios that allow creating progressively complex dependency graphs of timelines, runnables, swing workers and custom application actors
• Support for threading rules of UI toolkits that frees the application code from creating convoluted nested inner classes and prevents it from deadlocking and freezing the UI
• The extensibility layer that allows application to extend the existing core functionality to additional property classes and UI toolkits

Going forward, i intend to evolve Trident, and i already have a couple of post-1.0 features in the pipeline. The next major release of Substance will be rewritten to use Trident – further testing the published APIs for usage in real-world scenarios. In addition, the next major release of Flamingo ribbon will add Trident-based animations – where applicable.

Finally, no project is complete without the users trying the different features, pushing the existing APIs, reporting bugs and asking to support additional requirements. Subscribe to the mailing lists and let me know what is missing, and how the existing APIs can be improved. If you find a bug, report it in the issue tracker. If you want to take a look at the code, check out the SVN repository and subscribe to the “commits” mailing list.