What Java offers to the Psychophysicist

Full Screen Exclusive Mode and new Java2D API
Full Screen Exclusive Mode (FSEM) is introduced to core Java platform with version 1.4. Sun probably had the gaming industry in mind when they introduced it, nevertheless this offered a marvelous opportunity for psychophysicists. This mode and the new Java2D API, allow capturing the entire screen, provides tools for double buffering and proper vertical synchronization, all of which are essential for psychophysics programming. Depending on the OS/architecture, Java may use different strategies in FSEM. For instance on MS Windows it will most probably use the DirectX routines, on Mac OS X it uses native OpenGL libraries, on Linux/Unix it uses X11 libraries but can be instructed to use OpenGL libraries instead.

Architecture specific details are hidden while low level access is still possible

Porting the Sample Code to the iPhone
The process of porting the sample code from the book to the iPhone highlights some of the unique features of the iPhone. In particular, some of the unique features of the development environment include:

• The use of Objective C
• The process of creating an EGL rendering context using the EAGLContext.
• Detection of device capabilities and creating an OpenGL ES 2.0 context
• The use of a framebuffer object as the primary rendering surface

Once you have created and setup a rendering context, programming with OpenGL ES 2.0 on the iPhone is identical to any other platform. However, there are some unique aspects of the platform that are worth understanding before jumping into the code.