It exposes cross-platform libraries commonly used in developing video games and multimedia titles, such as Vulkan, OpenGL, OpenAL and OpenCL.

The main philosophy is to expose underlying technology as a thin wrapper, thus creating an API close to the original.

Development of the library began in 2002 with the release of J2SE 1.4, making use of the newly-added non-blocking I/O operations and off-heap memory access.

Bindings to each of the native libraries exist as different modules so developers can make custom builds with only the things they need in a certain program.

To make this process easier, the project provides an online build configurator, which allows users to download custom combinations of modules and automatically generates Maven and Gradle configuration files to ease their use with existing projects.