SGT Beans: Easy-To-Use Graphics Toolkit for Java Applications and Web Applets

Don Denbo
Pacfic Marine Environmental Lab, OAR

The Scientific Graphics Toolkit (SGT), a library of java graphics classes, facilitates the development of platform independent, Java applications and web applets to produce highly interactive, flexible, publication quality, object-oriented graphics of scientific data. Features include user settable or automatically scaled axes, sophisticated, automatically self-scaling time axes, mouse-movable objects (labels, line keys, icons), customizable objects, automatic generation of legends to explain the data being displayed and contour plots.

We have made this powerful graphics toolkit significantly more accessible to a far wider community of non-expert users by creating easy-to-use SGT Beans. SGT Beans is easier for an expert programmer to utilize, and moreover, gives beginner and intermediate Java developers access to these powerful scientific graphics in their Java applets, applications, and servlets, without the steep learning-curve required to use SGT directly. SGT has currently been downloaded by 5670 unique sites in 70 countries. See http://www.epic.noaa.gov/java/sgt for more information and download links.

This tutorial will first present a brief overview of SGT Beans then develop a simple example using the Beans. This will be followed by a more in-depth discussion of the principle graphical components and the development of a more complex example using SGT Beans. Handouts will include all source code presented during the tutorial and a summary of the SGT Beans and classes.