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.