This article, the first in a two-part series, describes the Mobile 3D Graphics API (JSR 184). The author introduces you to 3D programming for Javaâ„¢ mobile devices and shows how you can work with lights, cameras, and materials.

Playing games on mobile devices is a fun pastime. Up until now, hardware performance has favored classic game concepts that use addictive game play, but simple graphics. Today, Tetris and Pac-Man are increasingly complemented by two-dimensional action games with extensive graphics. Consequently, the next step is to move toward 3D graphics. Sony’s PlayStation Portable shows the graphics power you can put into a mobile device. Although the average mobile phone is technologically behind this specialized game machine, you can see where the market is heading. The Mobile 3D Graphics API (M3G for short), defined in Java Specification Request (JSR) 184, is an industry effort to create a standard 3D API for mobile devices that support Java programming.

M3G’s API can be divided roughly into two parts: immediate and retained mode. In immediate mode, you render individual 3D objects. In retained mode, you define and display an entire world of 3D objects, including information on their appearance. You can imagine immediate mode as the low-level access to 3D functions, and retained mode as a more abstract, but also more comfortable, way of displaying 3D graphics. In this article, I’ll explain the immediate mode APIs. The second part of this series shows how to use retained mode.

Article: 3D graphics for Java mobile devices, Part 1: M3G’s immediate mode

Open source Portlet-compliant Liferay 3.5 has been released, this new version adding hot deployable themes, portlet instancing (portlets appearing more than once on a page), built in support for Sun JSF and MyFaces, friendly URLs, and more.

Liferay is designed to deploy portlets that adhere to the Portlet API (JSR 168). Many portlets are bundled with the portal (Mail, Document Library, Calendar, Message Boards, to name a few). Liferay is appserver and database agnostic, and was originally designed to support ASP’s by having one server/db instance serve multiple independent domains. Liferay integrates with Spring, and has been around for a while and has a number of notable real customer deployments.

Jing Xue also blogged posted his first impressions.

* Liferay open source portal 3.5 released

JSF 1.2 and JSP 2.1 Public Review Specifications Now Available