Comments on: Hardware Accelerated Effects in Swing with JXLayer and Decora

By: lqd

lqd — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 20:54:23 +0000

For deployment the only thing you need in addition to JXLayer is a dependency to the JavaFX runtime, as you can see in the jnlp files for the demos.

The jars/dll are only used during development, for compilation and testing. Get the jars and dlls from the JavaFX SDK, and put them somewhere in your project folder (eg: lib). Add the jars to the classpath, and run your app with the folder where you put the dlls as the library path (in our lib example: -Djava.library.path=lib or something similar).

To know whether an effect is accelerated, take a look at the DecoraLayerEffect and DecoraEffectRenderer to learn how to use the Effect.getAccelType() method, which returns the type of acceleration that is used with this effect.

That should be it.

By: Per-Erik Svensson

Per-Erik Svensson — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 11:47:31 +0000

This is really good work! However, I’m not sure how to get this to work on my end. Firstly, where should the dll’s go and how do I know when I’ve succeeded with getting this hardware accelerated. I mean, I have a class that renders a Gaussian Blur on a JXLayer, but it is really slow so I guess all calculations are done in software. I don’t know much about the low-level details of swing/java2d/javafx (or java for that matter) so it would be great to get a short description of where to put all this stuff (the dll’s) if one wanted to distribute something more “real”. :)

Great work though!

By: Osvaldo Pinali Doederlein

Osvaldo Pinali Doederlein — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 21:29:53 +0000

Hehe, Richard probably can’t answer that, I wish JavaFX’s development could leave soon its stage of private development… a big, disgusting step backwards after the last years of Sun moving everything to open source… but probably a necessity, until they “cross the chasm” in adoption and competition with other RIA techs; they are all issuing updates frenetically and trying to kick each others’ butts with first or exclusive features, and some secrecy is part of the game.

On public JSL, I hope the JavaFX leads consider that this may be a serious competitive advantage. The other guys have important advantages. Flash is the incumbent, with ubiquitous deployment and design tools that are first-class and loved by all designers. Microsoft has enormous resources and they’re delivering an impressive volume of new functionality in short iterations; and they already have at least one killer feature, smooth streaming (although this is apparently more a server-side IIS Media Services feature) and I guess the HLSL facility can be great to do very cool stuff in realtime on top of streaming video. Now, JavaFX is still the underdog; while it has some developer-centric advantages like the really great JavaFX Script language, they need user-centric killer features, in other words “shiny stuff”.

By: lqd

lqd — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 19:25:56 +0000

hehe osvaldo, i wish i knew :)

I’ve asked richard bair about it on twitter, but no answer yet.

I would so love to have access to decora’s compiler back, we could have in java, and javafx, the features flash’s pixelbender and silverlight/wpf hlsl effects already offer. Access to the compiler is the only thing that prevents us from doing that, it’s too bad, i know.
You might have a good point, if prism offers better performance and 3d integration/acceleration, that will probably help in stabilizing decora/scenario, and getting to a point where Sun’s happy enough about them that they might let us play with it. We can only hope, unfortunately i have no idea if/when that’s going to happen.

By: Osvaldo Pinali Doederlein

Osvaldo Pinali Doederlein — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 14:18:06 +0000

Do you know if together with Prism, JavaFX will expose JSL for custom shader programming? That would kill. Chris is really mean to create that sort of stuff and keep it for himself. ;-)

By: lqd

lqd — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 08:06:36 +0000

This is using the stock javafx 1.2. Check the javafx demos, if they’re not hardware accelerated, then those demos won’t be either, obviously :)

By: Philippe Lhoste

Philippe Lhoste — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:52:13 +0000

Actually, I saw no difference between Decora and the other blur effects.
But now, I have rather old hardware (4 or 5 years old…), so perhaps Decora just falls back on computed blur, or something.
I should try on more recent hardware.
I find your experiments interesting, I hope Sun will soon free these libraries.

By: lqd

lqd — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 22:57:39 +0000

I tested those demos under windows and linux, both with fairly recent hardware.

I really can’t tell for Sun, but from my perspective it seems that the focus is FX script for the moment, when that’s more advanced/stable/what have you, you never know. To me it’s pretty obvious people would want to leverage the respective strengths of each “platform” instead of fragmenting efforts and possibly losing investment, know-how, etc.

As for Decora, it has changed a lot internally, (the backends and their respective renderers, + the effects’ peers – the in fine implementation of the effect – as well), and is still changing as we speak (JIRA says it all), but not the effects API which is what you’d use with JXLayer here. The internal changes are only impacting me as it modifies the way you apply an effect to a java2d image, ie the DecoraEffectLayer impl only.

As for Scenile, no it’s not dead or obsolete at all, i have updated it for every release too, but never blogged about it ;) I have been working on some exciting stuff for it, at least to me. It’s the only way i can get a scene out of a visual tool, so it’s pretty much vital to me. Of course now that JavaFX 1.2 has made my life way harder to use it from java, i have more work to do, but i’ll get to it. For the animation part, yes, Trident is pretty much the only animation library that’s alive right now. You could also use Scenario’s 1.1 support.

I’d love to have the distribution clause relaxed a bit, i intended to use the JavaFX runtime with OSGi and that clause prevents it, so let’s cross our fingers.

I hope Sun can give us some information on all those questions.

By: Richard Osbaldeston

Richard Osbaldeston — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 22:09:45 +0000

Do these demos work as well on all platforms? Any chance of showing the FPS for each pane in the first demo?

I was also wondering if Sun/Chris have ever talked about firming up the API for Decora for Java/Swing users? In the JavaFX != JavaFX Script sense. I know Scenario changes have caused you some headaches and commonly described as an ‘implementation detail’ i.e. dont rely on it not changing without much warning. What I’m getting at is Decora stable or just-hasnt-changed-yet?

Incidentally, would you write off Scenario for Java users now leaving Trident as the only current/supported animation lib? RIP Scenile?

One final possibly awkward question, where do developers stand on being able to distribute decora/javafx jars with their own products?