Piccolo Home Page: "A Structured 2D Graphics Framework

Welcome to Piccolo! A revolutionary way to create robust, full-featured graphical applications in Java and C#, with striking visual effects such as zooming, animation and multiple representations.

Piccolo is a toolkit that supports the development of 2D structured graphics programs, in general, and Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs), in particular. A ZUI is a new kind of interface that presents a huge canvas of information on a traditional computer display by letting the user smoothly zoom in, to get more detailed information, and zoom out for an overview. We use a 'scene-graph' model that is common to 3D environments. Basically, this means that Piccolo maintains a hierarchal structure of objects and cameras, allowing the application developer to orient, group and manipulate objects in meaningful ways."