How to do 3d in a Java applet?

I'd like to render a very simple 3D scene in a java applet. I could do all the math myself and render that开发者_JAVA技巧 to a bitmap, but as I'm sure I'm not the first person in history to have to draw a few cubes to the screen, I was wondering how this is usually done.

Every place I've read has said either Java3D or LWJGL, but as I understand it these rely on platform-dependent code and need to be installed separately from Java, making them both unsuitable for graphics.

So how is this usually done?

This old page lists the demos/apps/libraries of 3D Java applets with no hardware dependencies. Unfortunately very few are open-source, others are not even downloadable.

Personally I recommend you to experiment with Java 1.1 3D renderer by Ken Perlin, which has source code available and free to use for academic purposes.

EDIT: jGL is another Java 3D library with no hardware dependencies. It mimics OpenGL 1.* API. It is licensed under GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

In a plug-in 2 JRE (1.6.0_10+), you can use JWS extensions for embedded applets. This is important because JWS makes it much easier to ensure the correct binaries are on the run-time class path. AFAIU JOGL and Java 3D both offer JWS extensions for their APIs.

Should you choose to go that way, please make the applet has the draggable parameter added, so the end user might choose if they want a (mostly useless) browser window wrapped around a 3D animation.

I ran into similar problems when I needed to do some 3d rendering in an applet. My solution was to simply implement from scratch a 3d rendering library in Java. The fear was that it would be a poor performer but on an I5 processor, this proved to not be the case. The added advantage is that I was able to write the library in the way I always wanted graphics to be done. The real advantage,, though, is that it will run regardless of any need to have some graphics library installed on the client and without regard to any graphics card dependencies.

I will gladly share a subset of this code to anyone who wants to look at it.

Could you use JOGL?

http://download.java.net/media/jogl/demos/www/applettest-jnlp.html

I'm not a Java guy, but 2/3 years ago when I was at univeristy I had the same problem :) I've tried jogl... and for noob in Java like myself I found it too complicated to configure and write something using it.

I used Java3d and it worked like a charm, the only problem I had back then, was that Java3d did not worked with all graphic cards. But fortunatelly it worked with computers at my univeristy :)