piccolo2d android,Piccolo2D - A Structured 2D Graphics Framework

A Structured 2D Graphics Framework

Welcome to Piccolo2D! A revolutionary way to create robust, full-featured

graphical applications in Java and C#, with striking visual effects such as

zooming, animation and multiple representations.

Piccolo2D is a toolkit that supports the development of 2D structured graphics programs,

in general, and Zoomable User

Interfaces (ZUIs), in particular. A ZUI is a new kind of interface that presents a huge

canvas of information on a traditional computer display by letting the user smoothly zoom in,

to get more detailed information, and zoom out for an overview. We use a "scene graph" model that is common to 3D

environments. Basically, this means that Piccolo2D maintains a hierarchal structure of

objects and cameras, allowing the application developer to orient, group and manipulate

objects in meaningful ways.

Why use Piccolo2D? It will allow you to build structured graphical applications without

worrying so much about the low level details. The infrastructure provides efficient

repainting of the screen, bounds management, event handling and dispatch, picking

(determining which visual object the mouse is over), animation, layout, and more. Normally,

you would have to write all of this code from scratch. Additionally, if you want to build an

application with zooming, that's built right into the framework too.

What exactly is it? Piccolo2D is a layer built on top of a lower level graphics API. There

are currently three versions of the toolkit: Piccolo2D.Java, Piccolo2D.NET and

PocketPiccolo2D.NET (for the .NET Compact Framework). The java version is built on Java 2 and

relies on the Java2D API to do its graphics rendering. The .NET version is built on the .NET

Framework and relies on the GDI+ API to do its graphics rendering. This makes it easy for

Java and C# programmers, even those targeting PDAs, to build their own animated graphical

applications. And best of all, Piccolo2D is free and open source!