jGL and its applications as a Web3D platform

This paper proposes a new platform for 3D graphics on the Internet (and recently also for Web3D). To develop 3D graphics programs on the Internet is not very easy, because there are no high-quality tools like OpenGL. For this purpose, we have developed a 3D graphics library, called jGL, by using pure Java since the end of 1996. At that time, we ignored some functions, such as texture mapping, because these functions were too complex to be realized on low-cost machines, even on the fastest machine three years ago. jGL is a general-purpose 3D graphics library, and its application-programming interface is defined in a manner quite similar to that of OpenGL. Today, the hardware is better, but the network bottleneck is still the same as before, so we almost re-wrote all the code to enhance its capabilities and performance and minimized its code size to make it more suitable for running on the Internet. Moreover, VRML is a standard 3D graphics file format and very popular. To display or play a 3D model or scene on the Internet, people would like to use the VRML file format, and use the VRML browser plug-in of the Internet browsers to view it. Unfortunately, besides the Microsoft Windows and SGI workstation environments, the support for displaying VRML models is not enough. Hence, we also developed a real platform independent VRML browser applet by using jGL, that can be used on any Java enabled Internet browsers. It is also a good example for jGL. CR Categories: C.2.5 [Computer-Communication Networks]: Local and Wide-Area Networks – Internet; D.2.2 [Software Engineering]: Design Tools and Techniques – Software libraries; I.3.2 [Computer Graphics]: Graphics Systems – Distributed/network graphics; I.3.4 [Computer Graphics]: Graphics Utilities – Graphics packages, Software support Additional