First Day

Visualization is an emerging field, at least from the computing perspective. It includes research in computer graphics, image processing, animation and multimedia presentation. Visualization has applications in the arts as well as the sciences.

Scientific visualization (sometimes SciVis or even SciVi) is concerned with the graphically representation of data as a tool to obtaining insight into the data. Scientific visualization at its best is interactive, cooperative and internet based.

• Join the Java Lobby. (Or why not to get your "Java" form Microsoft. see section 3 #13 for a detailed reasons why J++ is not recommended.)
• The NASA Ames list of Scientific Visualization Sites
• The Java Developer Connection a free service of Sun/Javasoft. You must register to get the beta versions of Java needed for the course. The course will use jdk1.2beta4, java3d1.1beta1 and perhaps other software available here. A shipping version of java 1.2 is expected by years end. Currently only Sun Solaris on Sparc (not x86) and win32 are supported.
• IBM's Java Page
• Java FAQ Archives A long list of Java FAQ's.
• The VisAD home page where you can download VisAD for free. It seems the downloadable version is updated with bug fixes on a regular basis.

• The hello world program. Create a file "Hello.java" (capilization is important) containing

  class Hello {
  	public static void main(String[] args ) {
  		System.out.println( "Hello World" );
  	}
  }
  

• Compile Hello.java to Hello.class with the command "javac Hello.java"
• Run the program with "java Hello".
• The on-line Java Tutorial
• The programmers faq has a list of problems and answers of why the hello world example might fail.