Question: I'd like to render a very simple 3D scene in a java applet. I could do all the math myself and render that to a bitmap, but as I'm sure I'm not the first person in history to have to draw a few cubes to the screen, I was wondering how this is usually done.

Every place I've read has said either Java3D or LWJGL, but as I understand it these rely on platform-dependent code and need to be installed separately from Java, making them both unsuitable for graphics.

So how is this usually done?

Answer: 
I ran into similar problems when I needed to do some 3d rendering in an applet. My solution was to simply implement from scratch a 3d rendering library in Java. The fear was that it would be a poor performer but on an I5 processor, this proved to not be the case. The added advantage is that I was able to write the library in the way I always wanted graphics to be done. The real advantage,, though, is that it will run regardless of any need to have some graphics library installed on the client and without regard to any graphics card dependencies.

I will gladly share a subset of this code to anyone who wants to look at it.
Could you use JOGL?

<http://download.java.net/media/jogl/demos/www/applettest-jnlp.html>