Java advice

[NotAGolf]

Hi guys, i'm after a bit of advice for my dissertation project. I've posted something similar before but now I've got a bit of a better of idea of what I need. Basically I want to create something similar to google earth, you will pass the appplication the longitude and latitude of a point, then it will draw the surroundings of that point in a simlar fashion to google earth, then you will have the options to rotate the camera and zoom in and out (but obviously not as close in), and obviously the whole thing will not be as detailed. I have got the data I require; a list of positions defined by their longitude and latitude and the elevation at the point. So basically I need to just plot all these points, and add some kind of texturing to make it easier to understand, i.e. green = sea level, yellow/brown = high elevation.

So my actual question is what would be the best tool for acheiving this using Java? There's the existing Java 2D API, but I think this lacks the complexity I may require (however if it doesn't this would probably be perfect), and a couple of people on here suggested OpenGL and the accompaning "The RedBook", and another suggested jogl 3D Java.

Does anyone have an opinion on either of these 3 or any other tools I could use? The main thing I'm looking for is it to be as simple as possible, and to have a book/guide that I could teach myself from.

Thanks very much for any advice

 

[NotAGolf]

Ok thanks for that. Is the "RedBook" a good book to learn the ins and outs of openGL? Bearing in mind I need it to start at a fairly basic level and it shouldn't need to go too in depth (hopefully).

Is there any other books/tutorials etc I should bear in mind? Thanks again.

*edit* - also, is the book based on using java? Or does it not really matter because openGL is 'standalone'?

 

[NotAGolf]

The only reason I said I would do it in Java is because I have the most experience in it and I have used VERY basic graphics command using Java2D, I just thought it would lend itself better than C, which is the only other language I have experience in, so if openGL works better in, or is more suited to C then i'm happy to use that.

It is straight C though not C++ right?

Thanks again!

 

[NotAGolf]

Sorry for reviving a dead thread but i'm after some help cos i'm finding it hard to get jogl setup and working in Java using netbeans. I've looked in the user guide that was in the jogl zip file but I dont really understand all the pathnames etc you have to setup (using xp btw). Also I downloaded a couple of the sample programs from the NeHe site Lagz suggested but there's errors everywhere because it cant find the symbols/methods used, i'm guessing because it's not found the correct jogl library as stated by the import lines at the top of the file. Could anyone help explain how to setup the jogl library and what I need to include in the import command to get things started?

Thanks for any help.