Where/how to start in 2012?

I have some old code I wrote in Java 3D, and think I want to move and extend it in JOGL. The current code displays some surface scans, and I want to enhance that and add multivariate statistical graphs (axes, labels, etc). I finally got some time yesterday to look at JOGAMP/JOGL 2 using Netbeans 7.1.1, and it was very frustrating. Difficult to find tutorials, lots of out-of-date (1.x) pages.

Am I even doing the right thing? Should I be using JOGL 1.x (seems more info is available online)? LWJGL, instead? Or, something else entirely for 3D programming?

Would someone be so kind as to point me in the right direction?

TIA

On 03/06/2012 09:02 AM, LordSmoke [via jogamp] wrote:
>
>
> I have some old code I wrote in Java 3D, and think I want to move and extend
> it in JOGL. The current code displays some surface scans, and I want to
> enhance that and add multivariate statistical graphs (axes, labels, etc). I
> finally got some time yesterday to look at JOGAMP/JOGL 2 using Netbeans
> 7.1.1, and it was very frustrating. Difficult to find tutorials, lots of
> out-of-date (1.x) pages.

First stop is our wiki. Yes information is partly outdated regarding
the packaging and native jar lib loading, see me prev. post.
However, many folks did a great job documenting the usage,
ie. Wade's effort to walk-through Eclipse.

>
> Am I even doing the right thing? Should I be using JOGL 1.x (seems more info
> is available online)?

Well, our goal is to make JOGL usable for today's environment
including mobile devices and all OpenGL profiles (GL4 - ES1/2).
See the JOGL/OpenGL docs on our webpage in this regard.

JOGL1 is 'frozen' for about 2 years now.

JOGL will offer you a true platform independent framework
for all devices w/o code change when using NEWT and a common
OpenGL Profile (GL2ES1 or GL2ES2).

Think running your code on Windows, Linux, Solaris,
MacOSX and Android (x86* - ARM).

> LWJGL, instead?

LWJGL is another nice OpenGL mapping for Java
with similar but slightly different goals, AFAIK.
Currently they don't seem to support agnostic GL profiles
and platform support.

> Or, something else entirely for 3D
> programming?

I don't want and I cannot make a decision for you
in favor for any binding (JOGL or LWJGL - or maybe native code).

>
> Would someone be so kind as to point me in the right direction?

Another interesting aspect of using JOGL is that we
completely abstract the native windowing system and
OpenGL profiles. We have our own native windowing system NEWT,
which is supported on Android as well.

If you would use native code, you
would need to implement all these tedious things for yourself
for every platform.

Porting your code to diff platforms would be a massive task.

Using JOGL/NEWT here, maybe JOAL and JOCL would give you the
perspective of a truly write once run everywhere experience.
To achieve the latter - we need to communicate and fix bugs, of course.
But that's why we are here .. and have all technology available
for a quality product (CI/Jenkins, SCM/git, Bugzilla, Forum, EMail, Jabber/Chat).

To help the decision making process,
regardless whether it's a multi millions dollar project or 'just for fun',
just browse a bit through the forum messages,
check our blog, streams and tutorials page on jogamp.org
and maybe even the git commits.

Our BOF presentations are available as well on jogamp.org/jogl/www

Your input is welcome .. and if you would like to edit
and update our wiki pages you - and anybody else is welcome
to do so !! Just ask .. and you get an account.

Cheers, Sven

>
> TIA

Hi

You can mix the latest "revived" version of Java3D with JOGL 2.0 but the old versions of Java3D only uses JOGL 1 on Mac, there could be some conflicts if you mix JOGL with Direct3D , for example when using an old version of Java3D under Windows.

We cannot force webmasters to switch to JOGL 2.0, we cannot force them to update their tutorials. I haven't had any reply of some French webmasters for years, one of them still gives a very bad advise consisting in putting all JARs into the VM. Anyway, you use a modern IDE and fixing some code using JOGL 1 in order to make it work with JOGL 2 is not very difficult.

I assume you only want us to point you in the right direction but asking us to tell you whether you should switch to the set of APIs of our main competitor is a bit silly because the answer is obvious for me: NO, JogAmp is better, JOGL is not dead. All projects that switched to our competitors have much problems despite of their biaised feedbacks: black screen, wrong resolution reported for the first monitor when 2 monitors are plugged, straight lines in the task bar and in the whole desktop when leaving the full screen mode under KDE 3, crash with some NVIDIA graphics drivers when used with OpenJDK (only workaround: install the Windows version of the application with Wine, not that good), ...
Of course, we have some bugs too but we have a real bug tracker and we don't hide ours behind the carpet.

Maybe have a look at Jzy3d, it contains some features that might be interesting for you including build-in axes. It relies on JOGL 2.0.

Edit.: I dare to speak about our competitor not only with sweet words because I really know it. I have used JOGL since 2006. I made this decision because at this time its competitor was just giving me a blue screen of the death under Windows with some crappy VIA chips whereas JOGL works fine. The next major version of the API of our competitor will have almost the same features than the latest release candidate of JogAmp but JogAmp is still more reliable.

Thanks, gouessej and Sven Gothel, for your prompt and thorough replies. They, in themselves, go a long way toward answering my questions. The provided links seem very good at cutting through the noise. I am off to do try some more programming. Again, thanks!

You're welcome and I hope my answer has been really useful even though I went beyond a strict answer to your questions.

I just wanted to follow up and let you all know that with your guidance, I now have a well-behaved JInternalFrame in my desktop displaying a most lovely and colorful triangle. Now that I have the infrastructure in place, I can study it to better understand what is going on. Of course, I really want to see rotating, rotatable gears running in my little window :), but I must work on some other things for a while. Thanks, again, to all!