Tech Report HCIL-2000-13

Bederson, B., Meyer, J., Good, L. (May 2000)
Jazz: An Extensible Zoomable User Interface Graphics ToolKit in Java
UIST 2000, ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, CHI Letters, 2(2), pp. 171-180.
HCIL-2000-13, CS-TR-4137, UMIACS-TR-2000-30

In this paper we investigate the use of scene graphs as a general approach for implementing two-dimensional (2D) graphical applications, and in particular Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs). Scene graphs are typically found in three-dimensional (3D) graphics packages such as Sun's Java3D and SGI's OpenInventor. They have not been widely adopted by 2D graphical user interface toolkits. To explore the effectiveness of scene graph techniques, we have developed Jazz, a general-purpose 2D scene graph toolkit. Jazz is implemented in Java using Java2D, and runs on all platforms that support Java 2. This paper describes Jazz and the lessons we learned using Jazz for ZUIs. It also discusses how 2D scene graphs can be applied to other application areas.