• A snowfall simulation for my Animation Algorithms class
• A keyframing system
• A billiards simulator
• A particle system
• An articulated figure motion system using BVH files
• A snowball simulation that uses some of the ODE stuff from cgkit
• A ray tracer built using the cgtypes from cgkit.

Woohoo!

Here’s a snippet from the demo application that shows how to render a date and stripe it with Christmas colors:

RenderStage[] listRenderers = new RenderStage[]{
     new DateRenderStage("yyyy"),
     new StripedRenderStage(Color.RED, Color.GREEN)
};
jList.setCellRenderer(new PipelineListCellRenderer( listRenderers ) );

The main benefit comes from the fact that you can reuse the DateRenderStage elsewhere completely seperate from the StripedRenderStage on either a JTable or JList. Using stock Swing, you would have to create a subclass of TableCellRenderer that did the date rendering for JTables and a subclass of ListCellRenderer for use on JLists and then add in striping logic if you wanted that too.

The initial idea for this came from this post at ClientJava.com which links to the HighlighterPipeline API from JDesktop Network Components. That API was too heavyweight for my uses because one must use a JDNC component (JXList, JXTable, etc.) to use a HighlighterPipeline whereas with renderpack pipelines, you’re dealing with normal Swing renderers that can be put on normalnormal Swing components. The intention of JDNC Highlighters seems to be a bit different though in that they are meant to decorate existing renderers whereas renderpack pipelines are the renderer.

A jar that you can drop into your classpath and the full source are currently available from the renderpack webpage in addition to being available from CVS.