2D Animation of Recursive Backtracking Maze Solution Using JavaFX Versus AWT and Swing

This paper describes software developed by the author, that constructs a two-dimensional graphical maze and uses animation to visualize the recursive backtracking maze solution. The software is implemented using three Java graphics technologies, Java Abstract Window Toolkit, Java Swing and JavaFX. The performance of these technologies is evaluated with respect to their graphics rendering frame rate and heap memory utilization. The scalability of their rendering performance is compared with respect to maze size and resolution of the displayed maze. A substantial performance gap between the technologies is reported, and the underlying issues that cause it are discussed, such as memory management by the Java virtual machine, and hardware accelerated graphics rendering.