Can anyone point me to a tutorial on how to use Vertex Arrays in JOGL? Thanks.
In particular, what is a direct buffer?
Coincidence 
I wrote yesterday an example class for Vertex Arrays.
A buffer (you certainly mean FloatBuffer, IntBuffer and so on from java.nio) is more or less a better array. Concerning the keyword ‘direct’, I quote from SUNs official JavaDoc: “[…] the Java virtual machine will make a best effort to perform native I/O operations directly upon (the buffer)”. It’s maybe out of topic here