Lottie4J Meets LottieFiles

2026-06-04 by Frank Delporte

A Conversation with Naail Abdul Rahman

Lottie animations run on Android, iOS, and the web. Getting them working on the JVM is a different story. Lottie4J started as a question: can JavaFX render them without a WebView? That question turned into a library, pull requests followed, and now this: a video conversation with Naail Abdul Rahman, R&D engineer at LottieFiles.

What we discussed

The conversation covers the full Lottie story: where the format came from (Bodymovin, the After Effects plugin picked up by Airbnb), where it is going with the dotLottie format, and what all of that means for a Java implementation.

Highlights include:

  • The history of Lottie, from Bodymovin to the Airbnb Android player to the open Lottie Animation Community specification
  • The dotLottie (.lottie) format: a ZIP container that holds multiple animations, theming through slots, and interactive state machines in a single file
  • Compliance checking against the LAC specification as a way to show clearly which features Lottie4J supports
  • Growing interest in Lottie for desktop applications, including from KDE and the JavaFX ecosystem
  • What the LottieFiles roadmap looks like

The video is timestamped if you want to jump to a specific topic.

What comes next for Lottie4J

The conversation pushed three concrete next steps to the top of the list:

  1. LAC compliance checking — a clear picture of which features Lottie4J supports accurately benefits both contributors and users.
  2. Better dotLottie support — multiple animations in a single file, and eventually slots and state machines.
  3. CI reliability — the headless JavaFX 26 testing setup documented here is already a real step forward.

Read the full post

The full article, including all links from the video, is available at webtechie.be.

Contributions, bug reports, and pull requests are welcome at github.com/lottie4j.