Swing equivalent of jQuery slideDown?

Question

What's the standard/recommended way to animate Swing components similar to jQuery slideUp and slideDown animations?

I'd like to have my modal dialog grow and shrink to show an exception based on a button press e.g. "show exception" on an error dialog will open up a JTextArea that holds the exception, but the opening would have a slideDown effect where the additional content would quickly and smoothly expand vs suddenly appear.

My preference is to avoid thick third-party libraries, but I'll consider them if there's something stellar. Also, I'm genuinely curious how one would go about writing this thing with Swing...I'm familiar with Java, less so with Swing.

Answer 1

the swingx library has this done already for you. Use the JXErrorPane. Here's a link:

http://swingx.java.net/