MT4j – Multi-touch for JAVA Technology

SHERKOT, India - March 31, 2014 - PRLog -- Multi-touchtechnology has received considerable attention inrecentyears.Eventhough  thetechnology  hasexistedformorethan   20   years,   the   current   hype   regarding   the   multi-touch interactionstartedno earlierthan2005,whenanarticleaboutlow- cost  construction  ofmulti-touch  screensmade  multi-touch technologyavailabletoabiggercommunity.In2006,avideo showingmulti-touchinteractionexperimentsandpotentialsofthe technologywas hyped across theinternet,which was the firstcontactwiththetechnologyformanyconsumers.

In   the meantime, products with   multi-touch   capabilities arereadilyavailableandverysuccessful,forinstanceApple’siPhoneorMicrosoft’s interactive tableMicrosoftSurface.Itisalso likelythatMicrosoft’s supportformulti-touchin Microsoft Windows   7 will further increase the   relevance of the technology.

Multi-touch for Java (MT4j) is an open source   multi-touchapplication   development frameworkwhich isreleased undertheGPLlicenseandcanbefreelyusedbyanyone.Theframework provides highlevel functionalityandaimsat providing atoolkitforeasierandfasterdevelopmentofmulti-touchapplications.

In MT4j, graphical user interfaces are based on a hierarchic component structure which allows the composition of user interface components in a tree structure. There are two general types of components in MT4j. Invisible components provide basic functionality like the composition of components. Visible components can directly interact with the user input. The component based structure of user interfaces in MT4j is extensible. When creating a custom user interface component, a lot of functionality can be reused from available components. Custom components can be built upon already available functionality (e.g. hit detection, gesture processing) by composing primitive shapes and available user interface components to more complex components.

For rendering of MT4j components, the processing toolkit is used. Processing is an open source Java toolkit aimed at the creation of data visualizations, interactions and computational art.

The  interest  and positivefeedback  from   the  community, illustrated  by more than  100000  hits  on  MT4j.org  per  month(evenmorewhennewversionsarereleased),andfirstthirdpartyimplementations  based  ontheframework,show  thatthereisahighdemandforamulti-touch  application development  framework  based  onJava  programming  language.

Currently,weuseMT4jas platformforthedevelopmentofmulti-touch applicationswitha focusonmulti-user business applications. This includes applicationsfor collaborativeplanningand modeling.Additional componentsdevelopedduringthese projects will be part of future MT4j releases.