Gephi migration to JOGL2 and Newt

Hi guys,

I have been working on updating Gephi's [1] rendering engine from JOGL 1.1.1 to JOGL 2 and wanted to share some thoughts. We have been running JOGL 1.1.1a for a long time now (over 4 years) without major issues but as the latest Java update on Mac OS X essentially broke JOGL 1.1.1 [2], I'm looking into updating to JOGL 2. I wanted to do that anyway but now we can't wait anymore.

At this point, I have the Gephi's development version working with JOGL 2 and I want to thank the JOGL community for the great work! The transition has been quite smooth. I migrated to the new API in a couple of hours. A couple of notes:
- JOGL2 automatically loads the native libraries. Very cool.
- JOGL 1.1.1 made the UI (Swing) flickr on Mac OS X when losing/getting focus. JOGL 2 solves that issue.
- I'm trying out the Newt toolkit. This is game changing for us as it would allow the Swing UI to remain responsive even when the OpenGL visualization is lagging (which is inevitable with large graphs and low-tech GPUs). Big kudos to the contributors on that one. I'm using a NewtCanvasAWT canvas put on a JPanel and it seems to be working fine. I had canvas positioning issues with the 2.0rc11 but the development version (2.0.2-rc-20130425) seems to fix this issue.
- I'm looking forward trying out the new Text rendering. We draw a lot of texts on screen and I've been using the TextRenderer class. I've read on this forum that the new API should be faster. I'll do some experiment to confirm that. The text rendering is particularly slow on Mac OS X at this point.
- There is something weird with Java 7 (jdk1.7.0_21) and JOGL 2 on my Mac OS X. With some camera orientation, objects looses their color and become black. Looks like a bug, and it doesn't appear with Java 6. Does that sound familiar? I tried to run jogl with debug flags but nothing specific is thrown when the problem appears.

Cheers, Mathieu

[1] http://gephi.org
[2] https://github.com/gephi/gephi/issues/748

mbastian wrote

Hi guys,

Hi Mathieu

mbastian wrote

I have been working on updating Gephi's [1] rendering engine from JOGL 1.1.1 to JOGL 2 and wanted to share some thoughts. We have been running JOGL 1.1.1a for a long time now (over 4 years) without major issues but as the latest Java update on Mac OS X essentially broke JOGL 1.1.1 [2], I'm looking into updating to JOGL 2. I wanted to do that anyway but now we can't wait anymore.

You were just lucky. The maintenance of JOGL 1 has been stopped several years ago, you should have switched to JOGL 2 earlier in my humble opinion.

mbastian wrote

At this point, I have the Gephi's development version working with JOGL 2 and I want to thank the JOGL community for the great work! The transition has been quite smooth. I migrated to the new API in a couple of hours. A couple of notes:
- JOGL2 automatically loads the native libraries. Very cool.
- JOGL 1.1.1 made the UI (Swing) flickr on Mac OS X when losing/getting focus. JOGL 2 solves that issue.

Sven has done a great job under Mac. This platform is particularly difficult to maintain. Keep in mind that some problems may arise because of the experimental support of AWT in Oracle JVMs and OpenJDK under Mac.

mbastian wrote

- I'm trying out the Newt toolkit. This is game changing for us as it would allow the Swing UI to remain responsive even when the OpenGL visualization is lagging (which is inevitable with large graphs and low-tech GPUs). Big kudos to the contributors on that one. I'm using a NewtCanvasAWT canvas put on a JPanel and it seems to be working fine. I had canvas positioning issues with the 2.0rc11 but the development version (2.0.2-rc-20130425) seems to fix this issue.
- I'm looking forward trying out the new Text rendering. We draw a lot of texts on screen and I've been using the TextRenderer class. I've read on this forum that the new API should be faster. I'll do some experiment to confirm that. The text rendering is particularly slow on Mac OS X at this point.
- There is something weird with Java 7 (jdk1.7.0_21) and JOGL 2 on my Mac OS X. With some camera orientation, objects looses their color and become black. Looks like a bug, and it doesn't appear with Java 6. Does that sound familiar? I tried to run jogl with debug flags but nothing specific is thrown when the problem appears.

Cheers, Mathieu

[1] http://gephi.org
[2] https://github.com/gephi/gephi/issues/748

There are other means to keep a responsive GUI with a single rendering thread and large meshes. For example, you can drive the rendering fully interruptible so that the end user can modify the view even the rendering of a single frame isn't completely done. Do you reproduce your bug with pure NEWT without any AWT or Swing container?

Hi - Thanks for all your work on this - gephi is an amazing tool.  I was wondering when the upgrade might come through - I am still having trouble and assume it's java 7….

When Mathieu ends up porting Gephi, it will work better under Mac OS X + Oracle Java 1.7 thanks to JOGL 2.0. JOGL 1 is completely obsolete and outdated, it shouldn't be used any more.

 I was wondering when the upgrade might come through - I am still having trouble and assume it's java 7. need some help





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Rather contact the developer on Github. There is a separate branch based on JOGL 2.0 but I don't know whether it is really usable.