I\'m looking for a 2D scene graph library for building GUI applications. It should be fast, using Java2D and be compatible with Swing (embeddable in a Swing app and also display
Amino is another one created by Joshua Marinacci. It's very new, but has some interesting features such as CSS skinning, 2D or 3D backends. I am also very much intrigued about its use of an event bus rather than listeners, as that is quite in line with the Scala+Actor stuff I am working on at the moment.
That said, I haven't played with it (yet), so I don't know how good it is.
http://leonardosketch.org/amino
Piccolo2D, "academic work" or not, is well written. It's somewhat limited but does what it promises (a zoom-able graph) and does it fast. It can be used for at least basic animations such as moving, resizing, color transitions, etc but more can be done as it allows "normal drawing" as well. Has pretty extensive support for events for customization (here the "UI aspect" really shines).
It might be good just to try a few with "mocked" up scene to test for performance/features if this is really believed to be an issue. Piccolo is flexible enough to allow manual management if needed -- e.g. at different zooms display less and/or aggregate objects.
Happy coding.