www.dog.net.uk

This is a lightweight GUI toolkit for java, developed and maintained my a fellow called 'dog'. It's small and light, very easy to use, and works in current-generation web browsers. I prefer it to Swing, because it is smaller, faster, and offers more high-level functionality out of the box. At the core of dog.gui is the DList component, which mimics the bahaviour of the windows explorer main window, allowing items to be listed by column, list or tree format.

Dog also maintains 'knife', a mail reader. I haven't used this yet myself, but have an eye on the javamail providers that he has developed for Uncle Unc at some point in the future.

Released under library GPL, I think. Check his page for definitive word on that!

used in: ECCO Models, Uncle Unc

jini.org

Jini is an ahead-of-its-time networking technology for Java, based on Remote Method Invocation. Unlike most networking, which requires the client to locate the server, Jini networks spontaneously discover one another via a multicasting approach.

I've been using jini in my day job for over a year. It is a completely different way of interacting with networks, much more organic! This technology is eminently suitable for enterprise computing, for high-availability services, and has been badly miscast as an intelligent device technology, IMHO.

A jini browsing adapter for Uncle Unc is in the works. used in: Uncle Unc

www.jython.org

Python is a scripting language that can easily be extended and glued together with any aopplication written in C. Jython is an implementation of python for java, that uses the reflection API to automatically expose python bindings to every public member of every public class on your classpath. An excellent, compact language for debugging, interactive querying, prototyping and even rolling out into production.

Part Box contains an embedded python interpreter for users to script the simulations. Other projects use python scripts to test and startup. Uncle Unc is currently launched from my desktop by a python script. I love it!

used in:Part Box

Magician Home Page
l-system graphics created with help from philosophus

Magician is a java binding to the industry-standard OpenGL graphics library. Philosophus is a set of libraries for translating betwen various 3d file formats, and came bundled with some sample code for parsing l-system instructions. I list this stuff here because I used it to generate some airhorse shapes for a few POVray renders that I did.

Magician was available for free, has now been withdrawn. Last time I looked, Philosophus was still available for download, but as it required the Magician base classes, I don't know how useful it would be. In principle, it could be unhooked from any Magician-specific dependencies, I think (legally possible, too, as Philosophus was GPL-ed.)

Written by the great Alligator Descartes, author of the Perl DBI interfaces. Apparently not his real name!

idx3d Home Page

A very compact 3d graphics library written in pure java, capable of rendering in applets. Good quality, supports texture mapping and transparent objects, quite impressive. Good range of procedural texture generators (and geometry generators) included too. The coder interacts with a scene-graph rather than the rendering pipeline directly. Released under a free-for-non-commercial-use license, includes source code.

used in: Part Box

Official POVray Home Page
POVray trees
POVray l-systems

The venerable, powerful scan-line ray-tracer, available for Windows as well as UNIX systems these days. Interact through a simple scripting language. Capable of animations. Various patched versions with added features exist.

used in: Boid visualisations, L-System visualisation

k3d Home Page

An Open-Source Renderman-compliant modelling tool, with a very nice modular architecture and an XML file format. Written in C++ with a Javascript scripting capability. I have contributed a little to the project, and had my eye on using the Part Box to generate k3d documents as a way of rendering high-quyality images.

used in: Part Box (speculatively, at least)