simple animation

[kevin comario]

I have project due that requires me to write a couple of sorting algorithms and display them graphicly sorting, some sort of little animation. I have written them sorting algorithms out but i have never used the animation/drawing part of Java, so do quite know where to start. What i would like to is diplay the numbers on screen maybe with a big font and in color and have a graphical representation of what the sorting algorithm is actually doing.
like for instance i would like to display the array of numbers:
10 6 200 5 11 ....
then have the number that is being sorted float to its position.
200
10 6 5 11
and then land
200 10 6 5 11
my question is what is the best way to get started do i use awt or swing? how do i make my text big an color it? and how do i do the animation part?
any help would be great.

[Bill Liteplo]

A couple comments:
I would use Swing over AWT, definitely.
If you are creating your GUI by laying out components (and maybe moving them around), use JLabels. You can call setFont and setForeground on them for size and color.
If you are doing animation by customizing the painting (display) of a panel (JPanel), use the setColor method on Graphics2D, as well as a host of other things you could do there.
How you do the animation depends on how complicated your GUI needs to be. Probably, however, you should control it with a System time-based counter running in a separate thread that updates your display every X milliseconds.

Bill

[Dirk Schreckmann]

You may want to take a look at the threads section of Sun's Java Tutorial for a simple example of animated sorting that you could replicate.

[kevin comario]

thanks for the help but the applets dont seem to work for me it looks like a distorted television. Anyway do you know if i use ImageIcon could i write over the image such as placing a number over the image. and also since i can place an ImageIcon on a JLabel can i move it?
Once again thanks for the help.