Develop Reference

JBox2D - Drawing with DebugDraw

How do you draw elements with JBox2D? I'm fine using the DebugDraw, I just want to find a quick way to do this in Java since I haven't worked much with graphics.
Do I need to use a Canvas? Or a JFrame? And how does the world know when I call
world.drawDebugData()
where to draw it to?
How could I devise a class that just drew points where I want them, and integrate this with JBox2D?
...
while(true)
world.step(timeStep, velocityIterations, positionIterations);
Vec2 position = body.getPosition();
float angle = body.getAngle();
System.out.printf("%4.2f %4.2f %4.2f\n", position.x, position.y, angle);
}
I imagine I could put this code somewhere inside this while loop, but I'm not exactly sure where. Is there a function that's called every time a World steps? Can I put a draw function in there? I'm even ok using the DebugDraw if I could figure it out...
Could you please help me understand what kind of class would take all the objects in the World object and draw them continually? (and where to draw to?)

You can easily create new testbed tests, this is the best way to test out your new physics ideas and not worry about drawing and GUI stuff. It even supports adding extra real-time options. Check it out here:
https://code.google.com/p/jbox2d/wiki/Testbed

It's difficult to know where to organize everything if you're not used to programming games and physics engines.
Dyn4j is another great physics library that has great examples explaining where to put everything and even how the user can interact with the world. A lot about the dyn4j library is identical to box2d/jbox2d, so if you just try out their examples real quick, it will lend a hand to figuring out how to render graphics in box2d.

Best way for multilayered 2D Graphics on JFrame with partial repaint?

Basicly, I want to make a game of chess.
The idea is that I have a picture of a chessboard and the individual chess pieces. What I could get to work is a JPanel where I would repaint everything everytime with the new positions of the chess pieces, but this would require to get the positions of all chess pieces and repaint the board with up to 33 pictures, with double buffering and all.
A bit resource consuming I think. AFAIK, there is the option to only repaint a certain area, but I guess there're still better ways. What I could imagine is, just moving or removing one or two pictures or rather chess pieces each time rather than repainting something.
I sadly have only very limited knowledge of the classes out there and so I ask if there is such a way or even an entirely different one, that does the job more efficient than painting/repainting.

Instead of inventing the wheel again, use a game engine with sprite support like JGame to do the rendering.
Also note that today, the resource consumption to render chess is so small that spending a minute to optimize it is a minute wasted. What you should aim for is a framework which takes the least time to implement the rendering of the game so you don't have to spend too much time on this part of the game.
If you feel a game engine to be overkill, how about using a table with a custom cell renderer which draws each cell? The table will make sure that updates are rendered in an optimal way. You might even be able to use a custom TableModel to define the playing field.

How should I proceed to do a interactive program with drag feature and graph arrows

I'm doing a college project which I must finish in 3 months. And I have 8 hours a week to spend in that project.
The project consists in doing a graphical interface that shows many rectangles next to each other which should be movable. It should be very similar to the tabs in the chrome browser, where you can drag them to which ever position you want.
In addition to that there should be arrows connecting one rectangle to the other. And these arrows should still connect the same rectangles even when I change the order of the rectangles. The image below illustrates what I'm saying.
The image shows before and after one of the rectangles being dragged.
Since Java is my first language, I would like to use it.
My question is: What framework, APIs should I use to do this project. What will be the easiest and fastest way to do it? Should I use Swing? or JavaFX? or GWT? or other alternative?
Is there an API for handling arrows connecting objects? Maybe one used for representing graphs may be ok.
Edit: I don't know anything about Swing and neither about JavaFX. So which one would be more worthwhile learning given that I don’t have too much time this semester because I’m very busy?

This shouldn't be too hard to write from scratch.
Use this site : http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/116088/Draggable-Components-in-Java-Swing for the drag-able components
Draw arrows with some kind of parameterization (math formula) for half of an oval. Pass the draw path into a java.awt.Graphics2D pen object.

You might want to check Java Universal Network/Graph Framework.
It has some extensive support for making editable graphs while maintaining relationship among nodes and edges.
What you can do is change the icon of node to a squared rectagnle, while add logic to plot them in a straight axis so that it would look the way you want, plus it would be editable while linked arrows will remain where they should be.
But incase you don't have experience with Swing, better start learning the basis of SWING first, as JUNG framework pretty much requires some good basic knowledge of swing itself.

Suggestion for implementing a drawing program - UML designer

This program will have an infinite canvas (ie as long as the user scrolls, it becomes bigger) with a tiled background image, and you can drag and drop blocks and draw arrows between blocks. Obviously I won't use a layout manager for placing blocks and lines, since they will be absolutely positioned (any link on this, possibily with a snapping feature?). The problem arises with blocks and lines. Basically I'll have two options:
Using a simple layout for each building block. This is the simplest and clearest approach, but does it scale well when you have hundreds of objects? This may not be uncommon, just imagine a database with 50 tables and dozens of relationships
Drawing everything with primitives (rectangles, bitmaps, etc). This seems too complicated (especially things like text padding and alignment) but may be more scalable if you have a large number of objects. Also there won't be any event handler
Please give me some hints based on your experience. I have never drawn with Java before - well I did something rather basic with PHP and on Android. Here is a simple preview
DISCLAIMER
You are not forced to answer this. I am looking for someone who did something like this before, what's the use of writing I can check an open source project? Do you know how difficult it is to understand someone else's code? I'm talking about implementations details here... Moreover, there is no guarantee that he's right. This project is just for study and will be funny, I don't want to sell it or anything and I don't need your authorization to start it.

Measuring and drawing text isn't such a pain, since java has built in classes for doing that. you may want to take a look at the 2D Text Tutorial for more information. In fact, I did some text drawing computations with a different graphics engine which is much more primitive, and in the end it was rather easy (at least for the single-line drawing, for going multiline see the previous link).
For the infinite canvas problem, that's also something I always wanted to be able to do. A quick search here at stackoverflow gives this which sounds nice, althought I'm not sure I like it. What you can do, is use the way GIMP has a scroll area that can extend as you move - catch the click of the middle mouse button for marking the initial intention to move the viewport. Then, when the mouse is dragged (while the button is clicked) move the viewport of the jscrollpane by the offset between the initial click and the current position. If we moved outside the bounds of the canvas, then you should simply enlarge the canvas.
In case you are still afraid of some of the manual drawing, you can actually have a JPanel as your canvas, with a fixed layout. Then you can override it's paint method for drawing the connectors, while having child components (such as buttongs and text areas) for other interaction (and each component may override it's own paint method in case it wants to have a custom-painted rect).
In my last drawing test in java, I made an application for drawing bezier curves (which are basically curves made of several control points). It was a JPanel with overidden paint method that drew the curve itself, and buttons with custom painting placed on the location of the control points. Clicking on the control point actually was clicking on a button, so it was easy to detect the matching control point (since each button had one control point associated with it). This is bad in terms of efficiency (manual hit detection may be faster) but it was easy in terms of programming.
Anyway, This idea can be extended by having one child JPanel for each class rectangle - this will provide easy click detection and custom painting, while the parent will draw the connectors.
So in short - go for nested JPanels with custom drawing, so that you can also place "on-canvas" widgets (and use real swing widgets such as text labels to do some ready drawing) while also having custom drawing (by overriding the paint method of the panels). Note that the con of this method is that some swing look-and-feel's may interfere with your drawing, so may need to mess a bit with that (as far as I remember, the metal and nimbus look-and-feel's were ok, and they are both cross-platform).

How to create 3D Tag Cloud in Java

I need a suggestion/idea how to create a 3D Tag Cloud in Java (Swing)
(exactly like shown here: http://www.adesblog.com/2008/08/27/wp-cumulus-plugin/)
, could you help, please?

I'd go either with Swing and Java2D or OpenGL (JOGL).
I used OpenGL few times and drawing text is easy using JOGL's extenstions (TextRenderer).
If you choose Swing, than the hard part will be implementation of a 3D transformation. You'd have to write some sort of particle system. The particles would have to reside on a 3D sphere. You personally would be responsible of doing any 3D transformation, but using orthogonal projection that would be trivial. So it's a nice exercise - what You need is here: Wiki's spherical coord sys and here 3d to 2d projection.
After You made all of the transformation only drawing is left. And Java2D and Swing have very convenient API for this. It would boil down to pick font size and draw text at given coordinates. Custom JPanel with overriden paintComponent method would be enough to start and finish.
As for the second choice the hardest part is OpenGL API itself. It's procedural so if You're familiar mostly with Java You would have hard time using non-OO stuff. It can get used to and, to be honest, can be quite rewarding since You can do a lot with it. If you picked OpenGL than you would get all the 3D transformations for free, but still have to transform from spherical coordinate system to cartesian by yourself (first wiki article still helpful). After that it's just a matter of using some text drawing class, such as TextRenderer that comes with JOGL distribution.
So OpenGL helps You with view projection calculations and is hardware accelerated. The Java2D would require more math to use, but in my opinion, this approach seems a bit easier. Oh, and by the way - the Java2D tries to use any graphic acceleration there is (OpenGL or DirectDraw) internally. So You are shielded from certain low-level problems.
For both options You need also to bind mouse coordinates s to rotational speed of sphere. Whether it's Java2D or OpenGL the code will look very similar. Just map mouse coordinates related to the center of panel to some speed vector. At the drawing time You could use the vector to rotate the sphere accordingly.
And one more thing: if You would want to try OpenGL I'd recommend: Processing language created on MIT especially for rich graphic applets. Their 3D API, not so coincidentally, is almost the same as OpenGL, but without much of the cruft. So if You want the quickest prototype that's the best bet. Consult this discussion thread for actual example. Note: Processing is written in Java.

That's not really 3D. There are no perspective transformations or mapping the text on some 3D shape (such as, say, a sphere). What you have is a bunch of strings where each string has an associated depth (or Z order). Strings "closer" to you are painted with a stronger shade of gray and larger font size.
The motion of each string as you move the mouse is indeed a 3D shape which looks like a slanted circle around a fixed center - with the slant depending on where the mouse cursor is. That's simple math - if you figure it for one string, you figure it out for all. And then the last piece would be to scatter the strings so that they don't overlap too much, and give each one the initial weight based on their frequency.
That's what most of the code is doing. So you need to either do the math, or translate the ActionScript to Java2D blindly. And no, there is no need for JOGL.

Why don't you just download the source code, and have a look? Even if you can't write PHP, it should still be possible to read it and figure out how the algorithm works.