Introduction to Part I - Essentials of Interactive Computer Graphics - page 2

I
Introduction to Part I
This topic is about building interactive computer graphics applications. In Part I,
we concentrate on studying interactivity and the building of applications.
Interactivity. Chapter 1 shows us that interactivity demands the event-driven
programming model and discusses the elements of the event-driven model.
Chapter 2 shows us how to work with specialized graphical user interface
(GUI) application programming interface (API) libraries in implementing
event-driven interactive programs.
Graphics. Chapter 3 shows us how to draw simple geometric shapes with com-
puter graphics. Chapter 4 shows us the principles of working with special-
ized graphics API libraries.
Building of applications. Chapter 5 shows us the model-view-controller
(MVC) software architecture and demonstrates how to apply this architec-
ture in organizing the GUI API, the graphics API, and our programming
code to facilitate readability, maintainability, and expandability of our ap-
plication. Chapter 6 uses the MVC architecture to explain the software
structure of some real-world interactive graphics applications.
We will use the development of a simple example to organize our discussion:
a program that allows the user to simulate the shooting of a ball under the in-
fluence of gravity. The user can specify initial velocity, create balls of different
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