JOGL Part 1 - Introduction

This is the first post about the project I've done at an OpenGL course at my university. The course was about "OpenGL with Java" and used the JOGL library to interact with OpenGL from the Java side. Why Java? Why not. Today even JavaScript is able to interact with OpenGL.
Here you can see the final result:

As I'm no modeller or artist I used the magnificent Sponza model from Crytek, a detailed (and free!) scene that comes with all needed textures. I also used some models from the Stanford Laserscans. In the following posts about this project I will describe the techniques that are seen in the video. This is mainly a deferred renderer but I noticed soon that once that was done it was very easy to add other effects such as shadows, projecting textures or on-screen distortions. Table of contents (links will be added as they are written):

1. Introduction
2. The Deferred Renderer
3. Shadows

Next: The Deferred Renderer