Conclusion
Animated cursors are supported by most of Microsoft’s Windows operating systems via .ani files and supporting infrastructure. Because Java’s Cursor class doesn’t support animated cursors, I’ve developed a library to support animated cursors that are based on .ani files. For simplicity, I’ve evolved this library over three implementations, ending up with this article’s very useful implementation.
Although my work is done, your work might just be starting. Perhaps you’ll want to develop an implementation of the library that supports raw bitmaps (mentioned in Part 2) and recognizes JDialog ancestors (mentioned earlier in this article). Also, instead of replacing the glass pane as my implementation does, which isn’t considerate of program-installed glass panes, design your implementation to respect these glass panes.