LWJGL and JOGL

Lightweight Java Game Library (LWJGL)

The Lightweight Java Game Library (LWJGL) is a solution aimed directly at professional and amateur Java programmers alike to enable commercial quality games to be written in Java. LWJGL provides developers access to high performance cross-platform libraries such as OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) and OpenAL (Open Audio Library) commonly used in developing software games and multimedia titles allowing for state of the art 3D games and 3D sound. Additionally LWJGL provides access to controllers such as Gamepads, Steering wheel and Joysticks on a neutral platform. All in a simple and straight forward API.

LWJGL is not meant to make writing games particularly easy; the primary goal of the project is to provide a technology which allows developers to get access to resources that are simply otherwise unavailable or poorly implemented on the existing Java platform. The main philosophy is to expose underlying technology as a thin wrapper, thus creating a simple API. The LWJGL will, through evolution and extension, become the foundation for more complete game libraries and "game engines" as they have popularly become known, and hide some of the new evils which have had to expose in the APIs.

LWJGL is available under a BSD license, which means it's open source and freely available at no charge. Version 2.0 was released in October 26th, 2008, with new OpenGL 3 and support for Solaris.

See the LWJGL demos.


Java OpenGL (JOGL)

Java OpenGL (JOGL) is a wrapper library that allows OpenGL to be used in the Java programming language. It is currently being developed by the Game Technology Group at Sun Microsystems, and the JOGL project hosts the development version of the Java Binding for the OpenGL API (JSR-231).

It is designed to provide hardware-supported 3D graphics to applications written in Java. JOGL allows access to most features available to C programming language programmers, with the notable exception of window-system related calls in GLUT (as Java contains its own windowing systems, AWT and Swing), and some extensions. JOGL also provides full access to the APIs in the OpenGL 2.0 specification.

See the JOGL demos.