Jazz is a general-purpose Java-based engine that supports 2D visualizations. A primary characteristic of Jazz is that it is designed to support zoomable information spaces, although any particular applications may or may not take advantage of this feature. Jazz is implemented entirely in Java 2, and as such runs identically on any platform that supports Java 2.

Jazz is not an application in itself, but rather it is an engine that is designed to support applications that require the ability to create, manipulate, and render object-oriented graphics. If you are familiar with the terminology of 3D graphics, Jazz supports a scenegraph. This is a data structure that represents a hierarchy of graphical objects. Jazz uses the Java2D rendering engine, and uses a tuned run-time system to render the scenegraph as quickly as possible to support interactive applications.