openGL and JOGL

Texture Intro

Textures are simply rectangular arrays of data - for example, color data, luminance data, or color and alpha data.
The individual values in a texture array is called texels.
What makes texture mapping tricky is that a rectangular texture can be mapped to nonrectangular regions, and this must be done in a reasonable way.

Notice how the texture is distorted to match the distortion of the quadrilateral. In this case, it is stretched in the x direction and compressed in the y direction; there is a bit of rotation and shearing going on as well.
Depending on the texture size, the quadrilateral's distortion, and the size of the screen image, some of the texels might be mapped to more than one fragment, and some fragments might be covered by multiple texels. Filtering operations must be performed to map texels to fragments.

One-Dimensional Textures

Sometimes a one-dimensional texture is sufficient - for example, if you're drawing textured bands where all the variation is in one direction.

Three-Dimensional Textures

Three-Dimensional Textures must not to be confused with simply texturing a 3d object. A three-dimensional texturing covers a volume.

This is a link to a tutorial that demonstrats 3-dimensional texturing.