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: Developing Animated and Graphical Effects for Desktop Java™ Applications shows you how to build better, more effective, cooler desktop applications that intensify the user experience.

The keys to Filthy Rich Clients are graphical and animated effects. These kinds of effects provide ways of enhancing the user experience of the application through more attractive GUIs, dynamic effects that give your application a pulse, and animated transitions that keep your user connected to the logical flow of the application. The book also discusses how to do so effectively, making sure to enrich applications in sensible ways.

In-depth coverage includes

• Graphics and GUI fundamentals: Dig deep into the internals of how Swing and Java 2D work together to display GUI applications onscreen. Learn how to maximize the flexibility of these libraries and use them most effectively.

• Performance: Follow in-depth discussions and tips throughout the book that will help you write high-performing GUI applications.

• Images: Understand how images are created and used to make better Java applications.

• Advanced graphics: Learn more about elements of Swing and Java 2D that are of particular benefit to Filthy Rich Clients.

• Animation: Discover general concepts of animation, as well as how to use the facilities provided in the Java platform. Learn new utility libraries that vastly simplify animations in Java.

• Effects: Learn how to create, customize, and use static and animated effects—the mainstays of Filthy Rich Clients.

Code examples illustrate key concepts, and the book’s companion Web site, http://filthyrichclients.org, includes extensive demos, utility libraries, additional information on related technologies, and more.

Informal, fun, and, most of all, useful, this book is great for any developer working with Java to build desktop applications.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 10 Ratings

Practice what you preach - 2008-02-28
Reviewer Rating:
I want client-side java very much to succeed, especially now that it is open source, but the java.com site itself uses flash instead of applets, and the first author of this book no longer even works for Sun on java stuff - he now works on Adobe Flex:
http://graphics-geek.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-hello-world.html

EXCELLENT Learning Material - 2008-08-14
Reviewer Rating:
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 - 2008-03-31
Reviewer Rating:
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.

Great book if you are stuck on the dull data grids - 2009-04-02
Reviewer Rating:
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.

Very informative, but how convoluted is the access to the demos! - 2008-04-18
Reviewer Rating:
Apparently some negative reviews may "ban you from any party in greater San Francisco Metro Area," to coin a vernacular after Mad Money's Jim Cramer. But, I happen to stand by my opinion.

I have also enjoyed this book very much. Many of these techniques, such as using of intermediate images, were known to me, but numerous details escaped my attention. For example, using of 'compatible images.' I had no idea that this notion exists. I also enjoyed the timing experiments with and details of timer granularity, foremost in Windows. Their description of Animators is probably the best and most comprehensive of everything what I saw so far, its a real value-add for me.

I will not repeat the positive accolade summarized here by others, I have one very substantial objection, which is really well summarized in the title used by someone else's comment about this book:

"Practice what you preach."

The book preaches performance, efficiency and style, and yet the authors implement some enormous convoluted scheme around their own code snippets! Of course, being interested in timings and performance of the examples, I wanted to run and to watch them. And... I failed at first. I have spend, or wasted rather if you so want, a lot of time in an attempt to achieve this goal.

This sounds so easy nowadays to use Java Webstart, or merely to deliver some *.java or *.class files, either separate or in a *.jar archive.

Not so for Chet and Romain: Their own web page claims that you can download a plugin for Net-Beans and run the examples. Net Beans has proven to be a product, a specific development environment, with which you may, or may not be familiar. I never used it and I cannot operate it. Nor am I interested in learning it, being perfectly happy with my own Java setup. But be it as it may, I installed it in the hope to run these demos. It flooded my disk with some 125Mbytes and thousands of files, the usual mayhem, but we have now Terabytes at home, don't we? I also downloaded the plugin, and started to click around to get anything running. Lost in unfamiliar windows and menus I found nothing, no way to start any demo.

I must be getting old, do I failed the IQ test? All right than, I give up. Lets download the source code, run javac and be happy. What can be so difficult? Nope! The adventure has just begun!

An Example: Click on Chapter 2, Swing Rendering Fundamentals. You will get an archive frc-chapter2.zip, whose root directory has merely two folders and two empty files with the same name. On a hunch, step down into the directory SwingRenderingFundamentals, only to find another set of folders and a set of empty files, each with the same name like one of the directories. On a hunch lets step down into HighlightedButton, where we find a bunch of alien looking files and 3 more directories, with you guessed it, 3 more empty files carrying the names of these directories.

Among them is build.xml. XML eh? Hmm... what do I do with that? None of my systems can do anything with XML, this book is not about XML, I do not need to use XML, do I? It's a practitioners book about a specific aspect of Java. I would be happy to stay with "javac" and "java" only, please.

On several places I see a directory called CVS, this may or may not be a name of some source code managing tool. For example, a CVS directory (accompanied again by an empty file with the same name) contains 3 files. Each seem to have some generated content, like this file called Entries: /HighlightedButton.java/1.1/Tue May 01 22:48:46 2007/-ko/
Hm... It most probably serves a project tool of a sort. But how this relate to the book about programming graphics in Java and to the task at hand?

But one directory name is "src". Source, hurray, the treasury hunt might be close to an end! Indeed, this is how you can 'fish' for Java files, best done with a script of a sort. Simply copy all Java files into one single place. You will be fine. Deviating from the standard, most of them do not has any package specification corresponding to the directory they were found in. Once you get these files filtered out, you will even find among them Java files containing mere 2-3 lines of code, accompanied by a standard some 30-lines Sun copyright notice. Vive la lawyers!

Equally convoluted is the way to access these files on Java.net. In a hope for an easy one-click demo, and not willing to give up just yet, I registered an account with Java.net and dived into filthyrichclients.dev.java.net, only to find the same convoluted way of keeping Java files here and there among "a forest of directories" and sidecar files. Here however, I got finally educated that CVS is a repository system, and the web pages provide some comprehensive help in its use.

Please do not take me wrong: I do not want dismiss usability of any tool, like NetBeans or CVS, but pardon me, I was happy with my own setup. "If it isn't broken, do not fix it," I do not need to get hundreds of megabytes of some unrelated software, in order to find a few demo lines of Java, do I?

Authors wrote really a good book teaching practitioners algorithmic and best practices in using Java to generate well performing user interfaces. They should be focused strictly on the implementation of just such philosophy, and not on their particular development or source file control tools. The beauty of Java is that it can be used without any special environment. One needs only the Java compiler and the Java Virtual Machine. Compare this convoluted delivery with other (official) Sun Java tutorials, and their well conceived one-click demos. I would suggest to the authors of Filthy Rich Clients to follow this convention. At the least, please place the Java files in one single directory, or make one directory per chapter. That would be all what a reader would need.

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