Subject: Re: CCL:Why program in Java?

From: Egon Willighagen <egonw_at_sci.kun.nl>
Date: Sat, 5 Jun 2004 16:27:13 +0200

On Friday 04 June 2004 18:00, Mark Thompson wrote:
> One major drawback to scientific programing in Java, at the present time,
> is good 3D graphics. 

I agree with the situation that OpenGL support for Java is not where it should 
be... Java3D had very many bugs, and I guess JOGL is its successor announced 
quite some time ago already, and have not heard much about it yet...

But, the good news is, that for top quality molecular graphics, you don't 
necessarily need hardware accelerated graphics... Unless you need a *very* 
general 3D library, but just focus on molecular stuff, I would suggest to 
have a look at the Jmol v10 prereleases of which demo's can be found on this 
website:

http://jmol.sourceforge.net/preview/

Note that thousands of atoms as in the Nanotech example are not really a 
problem. In the field of biomolecular sciences, there are nice examples of 3D 
rendering in cartoon, ribbon format and some others.

Not likely the best performance ever, but very close.

Egon

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From: Szilveszter JUHOS <szilveszter.juhos^at^chemaxon.hu>
Date: Sat, 5 Jun 2004 17:17:57 +0200 (CEST)

Depending on the task java can be viable option - note I am working for a
company writing java software for chemists, so I am biased :) Well, for
high-quality 3D java have a look to VTK: http://www.vtk.org/ that has java
binding. AFAIK CheVi (never seen in action myself) uses VTK:
http://www.simbiosys.ca/visualization.html

Szilva