Jazz : A Toolkit for Object-Oriented 2D Graphics in Java (with zooming)

Comments

This paper clearly demonstrates the motivation and the architecture of Jazz. I think Jazz toolkit can be a nice guide to implement ZUI applications. Jazz provides developers a general ,easy and powerful way to build it. Jazz has clear structure (fig. 1) and its components are easy to extend. So far, so good.
But Jazz is so brand-new system that there is only a few application which was implemented in it - even Jazz itself is under construction. I think this could be one of major problems for justifying the usefulness of Jazz. I hope that nice applications built in Jazz could prove it soon.

Sharing nodes over distributed systems.

I think sharing nodes over networks would be valuable. I remember a short video clip about Pad. In that, two systems shared one zoomable space and two users were drawing each own part of a face (one was drawing eyes, the other was drawing outline?)
I think this could be implemented easily by sharing ZNode references over RMI. There might be problems such as network overhead, security checking etc. But It seems that including this feaure is not a bad idea.

Questions

Jazz.IO : How does it work?
ZWriteObjectRecurse() method name.

Summary

• Introduction
  
  2D graphics toolkit : renderer only
  3D graphics toolkit : renderer + scenegraph
  Jazz : 2D but supports scenegraph
  ; general-purpose toolkit to help developers of application that use object-oriented 2D graphics for multiple platforms
  
  
• Why another ZUI Toolkit (Reason for upgrading from Pad++)
  
  Tightly coupled with X and Tcl/Tk
  Class structure problem (hard to extend)
  Aiming Synergy effect with Java
  
  
• Risk
  Speed issue
  
  
• Design trade-Offs
  Clean design over speed
  Speed over memory usage
  No specific object policy
  No specific visual or interaction policy
  Support for complex applications
  
  
• Jazz Architecture
  Scenegraphs
  Optimized renderer
  Visual components : Fig. 2
  sticky Objects
  Cameras : surfaces or internal cameras
  Drawing order
  Coordinate system
  Object storage
  Lenses
  Events
  Layout
  
  
• Creating new visual components
  Extend ZVisualComponent class and define paint(), computeLocalBounds() and pick() method
  
  
• Model Based Objects
  ZModel : whenever data model changes, a visual component would be notified and would re-render itself.
  
  
• Multiple representations of objects
  delegator : fig 6
  
  
• Java.IO
  Conventional Java serialization
  : not all core Java classes implement the Serialization interface
  : Lack of version safety
  
  
• Current Status
  Do it right state
  Performance issue
  Faster JVM, Java2D library
  Optimizing code
  Implement potion of Java2D into native code.