Integrated Applications

Integrated media components are finding their way in to more and more applications all the time. That is no surprise given the visual appeal of these applications and the strong interest in multimedia in general.

Some interesting examples of this all-Java approach are already evident in examples, and you can even see some in the commercial marketplace.

Although the capabilities are there, the challenge is that there are not enough programmers with a background in even one of the Java Media APIs, let alone multiples of the APIs. Nor are there many books that emphasize more than one of the APIs. Image processing, 3D graphics, and streaming media are substantial challenges in and of themselves. Therefore, it is a rare person indeed who has these multiple skills.

Granted, we have only covered a portion of the Java Media APIs in this book. The possibility of integration with some of the other APIs not covered in this book is, of course, much larger.

In practice, many non-Java media, imaging, and visualization applications use other parts of the Java language to handle events, load applets, and perform networking operations. Consider the Java OpenGL bindings, for example. In this chapter, we present a few examples that show the value of integration.