Java

The term Java could refer to any of several things:

• The general purpose object-oriented java programming language originally devised by Sun Microsystems with an emphasis on portability between platforms.
• A particular java virtual machine allowing you to run java applications. There are several of these provided by various vendors.
• A java applet running as a web-browser plug-in (which requires the installation of a particular kind of java virtual machine).

Java is not the same as javascript, a scripting language now called ECMAScript, which is generally used in web-pages to cause pop-up windows, flashing lights and other annoyances.

Java Panorama Tools

Some of the original Panorama Tools by Helmut Dersch are written in Java and require a java virtual machine to run:

• PTPicker, the original graphical front-end for selecting control points.
• PTEditor, a tool for extracting, editing and re-inserting rectilinear views from equirectangular images.
• PTCrypt, a tool for encrypting JPEG images to make them viewable by PTViewer only in their original web-page context.

Note that none of these tools ever had source-code released and are only available in JAR archive form, they are unlikely to have future bug-fixes or be developed further. You can run them with varying degrees of success on various platforms using Sun JRE, Microsoft JVM, GNU GJC, IBM J2ME etc..

If you are having memory problems running JAVA tools there is a tutorial called how to allocate enough RAM for PTEditor that you may find useful.

PTViewer Java applet

Also created by Helmut Dersch, PTViewer remains one of the highest quality applet viewers for equirectangular panoramas. PTViewer has available source-code, so it is still under active development.

There are some other java applets for viewing panoramas.

Browser plug-in issues

To use the PTViewer JAR applet in a web-page, the client web-browser needs to have a Java virtual machine available to run it.

Previously, this was almost universally the case, however Microsoft have stopped distributing their implementation with Internet Explorer (though many OEM sellers of Windows systems sell machines with Sun Java already installed) - So you can no longer guarantee that Java is installed.

Sun Java is a free download from Sun, the download is about 15 MegaBytes and the installation is straightforward even for inexperienced users.