Tech Report HCIL-99-07

Bederson, B., McAlister, B. (May 1999)
Jazz: An Extensible 2D+Zooming Graphics Toolkit in Java
See updated report #2000-13 on the same topic
HCIL-99-07, CS-TR-4015, UMIACS-TR-99-24

Jazz is a new general-purpose toolkit that supports applications using zooming object-oriented 2D graphics. It is built entirely in Java using Java2D, and thus runs on all platforms that support Java 2. It supports zooming, internal cameras, and lenses in a similar style to Pad++, but does so in a general purpose manner without a specific focus on zooming. Jazz is primarily a "scenegraph" for 2D graphics that is analogous to Sun's Java3D and SGI's OpenInventor in their support for 3D scenegraphs. This paper describes Jazz and discusses the issues of using a scenegraph for 2D graphics. We discuss the Jazz architecture, and how applications can build on top of it.

Keywords: Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs), Animation, Graphics, User Interface Management Systems (UIMS), Pad++, Jazz.