Lightweight Java Game Library
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Lightweight Java Game Library (LWJGL) is a solution aimed directly at professional and amateur Java programmers alike to enable commercial quality games to be written in Java. LWJGL provides developers access to high performance cross-platform libraries such as OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) and OpenAL (Open Audio Library) allowing for state of the art 3D games and 3D sound. Additionally LWJGL provides access to controllers such as Gamepads, Steering wheel and Joysticks. All in a simple and straight forward API, however since LWJGL is still quite recent the API isn't yet complete. The LWJGL project also has bindings for FMOD and DevIL, formerly known as OpenIL.
LWJGL is not meant to make writing games particularly easy; it is primarily an enabling technology which allows developers to get at resources that are simply otherwise unavailable or poorly implemented on the existing Java platform. It is anticipated that the LWJGL will, through evolution and extension, become the foundation for more complete game libraries and "game engines" as they have popularly become known, and hide some of the new evils we have had to expose in the APIs. One such example is the Java Monkey Engine (frequently referred to as jME).
LWJGL is available under a BSD license, which means it's open source and freely available.
