A Brief Introduction To The Java 3D(tm) API

Henry Sowizral
Sun Microsystems

 
Java 3D provides an API for developing high-performance, cross-platform, interactive, 3D graphics applications and applets. Its simple, high-level programming model empowers developers to build, render, and control 3D objects and to does this in a cross platform manner.
 
The Java 3D API simplifies the developer's job by performing mundane tasks such as scene-graph traversal and state-change management. By managing such tasks, the API allows developers to focus their efforts on content development rather than performance optimization.
 
Java 3D synthesizes the best ideas from low-level graphics APIs and several scene-graph-based systems. It provides a flexible mechanism for representing and rendering scene graphs together with a versatile execution model that can render those scene-graphs in an immediate mode, a retained mode, and a compiled-retained mode, or in any combination of those three modes.
 
This talk will provide an introduction to the Java 3D API, discuss some architectural details and talk about future technology challenges.