piccolo2d android,Piccolo Home Page

A Structured 2D Graphics Framework

Welcome to Piccolo! 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.

Piccolo 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

Piccolo maintains a hierarchal structure of objects and cameras,

allowing the application developer to orient, group and manipulate

objects in meaningful ways.

Why use Piccolo? 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? Piccolo is a layer built on top of a lower

level graphics API. There are currently three versions of the

toolkit: Piccolo.Java, Piccolo.NET and PocketPiccolo.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, Piccolo is free

and open source!