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Java Media prominent at Siggraph97

The Java Media APIs and Java-based solutions burst onto the scene at this year's international conference for graphics and media professionals

By Bill Day, JavaWorld.com, 09/01/97

With the sweltering L.A. heat from August 3 to 8, attending all of the announcements, meetings, and other Java-related events proved to be a full-time, exhausting undertaking. If the prominence of Java at this year's conference serves as any sort of foreshadowing for next year's, you can expect to see a wide variety of Java-based solutions at Siggraph98 in Orlando, FL, next July.

A lot of ground was covered in Java Media over the six days of the conference. Given that much of the audience at Siggraph is involved in three-dimensional graphics, a large part of JavaSoft's effort was spent on evangelizing the Java 3D API. Expect to see a more technical article that compares the newly specified Java 3D API with OpenGL and VRML in an upcoming issue of JavaWorld.

JavaSoft made a major press release during Siggraph announcing the 1.0 Java 3D specification release as well as early access releases of the Java Media Player and Java 2D APIs and the Java Sound Engine. See the Resources at the end of this article for more information on this JavaSoft announcement and other Java-related activity at Siggraph.

The Java 3D course

JavaSoft hosted a full-day introductory course on the new Java 3D API. This followed the release of the Java 3D 1.0 specification to the public by just four days. (Does anyone get the idea that JavaSoft was rushing to meet a deadline?) Though JavaSoft showed demos running on both Solaris and Windows NT machines, currently there are no publicly available implementations.

The course was noteworthy in part because it was aimed squarely at graphics programmers and others who might not already be intimately familiar with the Java language and runtime. This tactic struck pay dirt for JavaSoft: Throughout the entire day of the course, the meeting hall remained near its capacity of 750 people.

The first part of the class centered on the general benefits of Java that we have all come to know and love from Sun's marketing activities -- namely, "Write once, run anywhere," and so on. It also included a brief introduction to the Java 3D API and its basic structure.

The other major sections of the course included:

• The Java 3D API -- A detailed discussion of the major objects and methods.
  
  
• Unique Features of the Java 3D API -- A discussion of the design center of the API and its inherent strengths and weaknesses.
  
  
• Applying the Java 3D API -- A case study presented by a speaker from Intel showing how Java 3D can be used to build compelling 3D games and environments.

Fundamentally, Java 3D is a graphics runtime that uses a Java-based scene graph, or a hierarchical set of relationships between objects in a three-dimensional scene, to render 3D graphics. As a higher-level API, Java 3D has been designed to be a common subset of all 3D graphics API functionality available in several major pre-existing 3D APIs. This gives Java 3D implementors flexibility in implementing on top of well-established APIs.