DirectJ: Java APIs for optimized 2D graphics

The ever more widespread diffusion of Java interfaces and animations has highlighted the performance problems of the Java graphics environment. We have analysed the bottleneck and created a set of APIs that support direct access to platform specific hardware resources for graphics acceleration. We have also re‐implemented standard APIs in order to allow transparent direct access also by programs using standard JFC. The improvement in performance of about one order of magnitude encourages the utilization of Java for realizing fluid animations on large windows. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.