Framework/library for simple 2D animation in Java?

Question

I want to write a very simple game in Java to demonstrate a wireless controller I've built. I thought of something like Breakout or Pong. Currently, I have a prototype Pong implementation that does all animation directly using the AWT functionality. However, this is somewhat awkward to program and also a major CPU hog.

My question:

Can someone recommend a library for Java to display simple 2D animations? What have you used for similar projects? The library should be easy and straight-forward to use -- I'm not looking for something like Java3D. Integrated collision detection would be a pro.

Answer 1

This question relates to comparisons of Java 2D frameworks and may be of use.

I'm interested as to why your original implementation is a CPU hog. Is that just whilst it's drawing, or is it consuming CPU resource all the time ? If the latter, it may point to a problem wrt. how you're querying/polling your controllers.