Sun Microsystems, the creator and leading advocate of Java technology, today announced that it has posted two new projects, Java Advanced Imaging (JAI) and JAI Image I/O Tools to java.net. With more than 115,000 members, java.net is the leading Java community and primary source for Java technology collaboration. With the addition of the JAI and JAI Image I/O projects, Sun continues its commitment to providing developers with the opportunity to contribute directly to code design in a vibrant, open environment. Java Advanced Imaging helps developers compete in today's heterogeneous, highly distributed networked environments by simplifying the creation of imaging applications that support a broad range of systems, from thin clients to powerful workstations. The imaging technology greatly improves developers' ability to implement portable image processing applications and its flexible, scalable design meets the demands of the geospatial, medical, commercial, network and government imaging markets. Benefits of JAI include: -- A standard interface for cross-platform imaging. -- Enabling the same application to be deployed on multiple platforms without source code changes. -- Simplified programming tasks and increased code reuse. -- Reduced time to market by enabling solutions to be deployed faster and at lower costs. -- Enhanced client/server imaging through a network-centric architecture and complementary technologies. -- Rapid adoption of highly optimized implementations that use the media capabilities of CPUs. -- Integration with the Java Media Application Programming Interface (API) family, enabling deployment of media-rich applications. JAI Image I/O is an important adjunct to the Java Advanced Imaging API, as it is a pluggable framework for reading, writing and transcoding image data and metadata. Reader-writer plug-ins are supplied for the Bitmap (BMP), Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG), Revised Lossless JPEG (JPEG-LS), JPEG2000, Portable Network Graphics (PNG), Portable Anymap (PNM), Uncompressed raw image data (Raw), Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) and Wireless BMP (WBMP) image formats. Additionally a writer plug-in is supplied for the Graphics Interchange Format (GIF). These implementations of readers and writers are important to application developers in the medical, document imaging, and geospatial markets and not available elsewhere in forms compatible with the Java Image I/O Framework. "In developing our imaging technologies we have been very focused on managing the ubiquity of imaging, its network-centric aspects and portable image formats," said Blake Connell, group product marketing manager, Sun Microsystems. "By moving these projects to java.net, we look forward to collaborating with the Java developer community on the cultivation and advancement of this technology. Already there have been breakthrough implementations using JAI, such as the Science Activity Planner for the Mars Exploration Rover. We know that with the input of the entire community the boundaries for JAI are endless." JAI helps global companies take imaging technology to the next level. In addition to its successful role in the Science Activity Planner for the Mars Exploration Rover, JAI is central to the design of Lockheed Martin's Web-based Electronic Light Table (WebELT). WebELT is the first Java technology client to provide superior viewing capabilities and higher fidelity image resolution from within Mozilla (Firefox), Netscape and Internet Explorer. Additionally, JAI is central to NinJo, a configurable client-server application framework and visualization workstation that uses layers to add special functionalities that process and display a range of meteorological data. Specifically, the visualization pre-processing chain of NinJo heavily depends on the JAI API to load, scale and reproject raster data (remotely sensed imagery such as Landsat, elevation data based on gtopo30, etc.) as tiled images. As a large, vibrant hub for the Java development community -- including software vendors, industry associations, universities, individual developers, students and hobbyists -- to collaborate on Java technology, java.net continues to experience tremendous growth. Recent successes include surpassing the 115,000 member mark and the new Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE) release (code-named "Mustang") project on java.net, which opened snapshots of the next release to the developer community for early review and developer involvement.