Using OpenGL with SWT

A scene may be drawn by making a series of calls to methods defined in the GL and GLU classes once the context is made current. The GL class exposes over 330 commands. There are essentially one-to-one mappings between methods defined in the GL and GLU classes and their native counterparts. Figure 3 provides sample code that draws a triangle. For every gl* function in C, there is a corresponding GL.gl* Java method, and for every enumerated value GL_* in C, there is an equivalent GL.GL_* Java constant. Adopting the same APIs in the SWT OpenGL plug-in makes it easy for those familiar with the C language APIs to code in Java.

Until recently, in order to exploit advanced 2D graphics, one had to depend on off-screen drawing. By relying on a BufferedImage one could use Java2D APIs to draw in memory, transfer the image to an SWT image, and then render it on any SWT component (see [2] for details). However, the drawback of this technique was added storage and processing time requirements. These limitations were overcome in milestone 5 of the 3.1 release through a new SWT API that utilizes native Cairo or GDI+ graphics libraries. Developers now can use transparency, rotation, shearing, brushes, pens and many more techniques for enhancing graphical output, directly in SWT. Unfortunately, even with these additions, the realm of high-performance 3D graphics is still out of reach.