Agile2D, a Java2D implementation based on OpenGL

OpenGL Development JOGL Development
#1

I found this today in de.comp.lang.java. As there was a recent discussion about the OpenGL based Java2D in Java 1.5 “Tiger” which will apparently only available with X11 I thought this open source project might be of some interest to some people here.

The Human-Computer Interaction Lab / University of Maryland has build a Java2D replacement on top of gl4java. Judging from the API doc, it should not be to hard to port it to jogl. They are using a pluggable renderer.

See for yourself:
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/agile2d/index.shtml

#2

Nice find :slight_smile:

#3

[quote]See for yourself:
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/agile2d/index.shtml
[/quote]
The two participants in the Agile2D project are both former colleagues of mine from my days as a research scientist at NYU. Jon Meyer, the main developer, has been one of my closest friends for about 9 years now and is one of the smartest, most capable developers I have ever worked with, so I can guarantee that the work on Agile2D is of extremely high-quality (though I haven’t used it myself). He and Ben developed Agile2D during their work on Jazz, a zoomable UI toolkit for java, now called Piccolo which can be found at:

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/jazz/index.shtml

If anyone has any specific questions regarding Agile2D, I would be happy to forward them on to Jon.

EDIT: The public version of Jazz was not implemented with OpenGL, but a lot of the early internal experiments were done using GL4Java which is how Agile2D came about.

#4

I’ve bee using Jazz in the last years for a couple of realworld projects and can backup AThomas by saying that it is really high quality. The mailing list is very responsive and bug fixes go into the codebase like a charm.

Jazz now has its successor called piccolo which allows to render to GL4java and also can handle SWT. And, it is much easier to use than Jazz.

Depending on the things you do, you will find out that even the common Java2D implementation isn’t too slow neither!! And VERY powerful. You really CAN do cool things with it!!