In my OpenGL research (the OpenGL Red Book, I think) I came across an example of a model of an articulating robot arm consisting of an "upper arm", a "lower arm", a "hand", and five or more "fingers". Each of the sections should be able to move independently, but constrained by the "joints" (the upper and lower "arms" are always connected at the "elbow").
In immediate mode (glBegin/glEnd), they use one mesh of a cube, called "member", and use scaled copies of this single mesh for each of the parts of the arm, hand, etc. "Movements" were accomplished by pushing rotations onto the transformation matrix stack for each of the following joints: shoulder, elbow, wrist, knuckle - you get the picture.
Now, this solves problem, but since it's using old, deprecated immediate mode, I don't yet understand the solution to this problem in a modern OpenGL context. My question is: how to approach this problem using modern OpenGL? In particular, should each individual "member" keep track of its own current transformation matrix since matrix stacks are no longer kosher?