Posted by rhatcher on Feb 11, 2011; 2:50pm
URL: https://forum.jogamp.org/Opinions-On-The-JOGAMP-JOGL-Status-Quo-tp2470518p2474002.html

All:

Thanks for the feedback - that's exactly what I was looking for and about what I expected to hear based on what I've seen so far in limited testing.

By asking about the "status quo" I only mean to see where the JOGAMP effort stands right now, and to gauge the group's general comfort level with the JOGAMP product since you guys are working on and/or with it every day.  Based on my initial experience with 2.0-rc1 I had cause to be concerned; however, between the group's feedback and the improved behavior of nightly b300 I'm feeling more encouraged.  It's always good to see Chuck Norris giving the thumbs up (our guys were greatly amused by that), but there is no substitute for anecdotal feedback from people working on fielded products.

I am reasonably tuned in to the history of this whole thing going back at least to GL4Java up through 1.1.1a being tossed out on the street, and the efforts at JOGAMP to put this product back on solid footing are greatly appreciated by those of use making significant use of Java and OpenGL.  Note that none of those comments are meant to diminish the contributions Ken Russell's group made to the prior product, and of course Sven before that with GL4Java.

Unfortunately for me our code base is large and a significant percentage of it is graphics code.  I'd need to covert the whole thing before I'd even know if it was fit to roll forward with.  Even though I can script most of the required changes I don't want to invest time in that until I feel like the chances are pretty good that it will either Just Work or any bugs I encounter will be easy to work around or fix.  It sounds like that would be the case.

Working in our favor is the fact that while we have a lot of OpenGL code none of it uses anything I'd characterize as advanced techniques.  There is a bunch of texturing and the occasional stencil buffer, but most of the rest is straightforward "stroke" type drawing.  Our installed production software base is small, most of the fielded hardware is relatively new and running some recent version of Fedora or RHEL, all of it is NVIDIA, and we always get to steer the hardware acquisitions for our customers.  Point being the target platform set is narrow, and probably one of the ones that is most likely to behave.

On the dicier side, there's a good chance we're going to transition our front ends to EclipseRCP/SWT at some point in the next 6 months, so how well JOGL2 works in that environment is a big factor in the timing of this transition.  I saw Wade has posted a few blurbs on this and I will be giving those a look shortly.  Some of the work you guys have done should result in a more straightforward integration with RCP.

Rob