David Janszen wrote:
> What I mean is that some of the terminology in 2D is so far off the mark
> that it appears that 2D was written without regard for any part of the
> existing World, the AWT included.
See Jim's response to that. Although some of the terminology was new to me
too, I'm certainly prepared to admit I've been exposed to the full gamut of
graphics vocabulary. What area of graphics is your specialty, BTW?
> The documentation is also very poor, but at least I know this is being
corrected.
In the mean time you might want to check out Jonathan Knudsen's Java 2D
Graphics book (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/java2d/), which contains lucid
explanations of many of Java2D's concepts.
> I can not help but assume that
> 2D's functionality mirrors its terminology and documentation, and will
> resist further study of 2D until the last possible moment, presuming I can
> not find something better.
It seems to me that since you almost certainly *will* end up using Java2D,
you'd be doing yourself a favor by trying to overcome your problem with
terminology sooner rather than later. It's *the* graphics API for Java
platforms (assuming you don't need Java3D or the more advanced image
manipulation of JAI [whose terminology would *really* freak you out,
incidentally]). At JavaOne today, even the people criticizing aspects of
Java2D (e.g. printing performance, bitmap rendering performance) seemed well
satisfied with the completeness and power of its imaging model.
> I do not think that any sane group would consider building on such a murky
> swamp.
Again, it's a shame you weren't at JavaOne to see some of the impressive
things people *are* doing with it. An IBM engineer has written an
implementation of the (developing) Scalable Vector Graphics W3C standard in
about 50Kbytes of compiled Java, leveraging greatly off the underlying power
of Java2D. There were plenty of other examples.
Have you actually tried coding anything using Java2D? In my experience, I've
been able to obtain the results I've wanted quite straightforwardly, at
various levels of abstraction (e.g. from plotting text along a path to doing
low-level filtering operations). I wish you luck, anyway.
Cheers,
Pete
PS Bijou disclaimerette: As of June 28th I will become the newest member of
the well-oiled software engineering powerhouse that is the Java2D team at
Sun Microsystems. While I don't think this interferes with my objectivity at
all, I can't really claim to be a *totally* disinterested party any more...
