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Re: JOGL upgrade fails

Posted by clevengr on Feb 12, 2012; 9:02pm
URL: https://forum.jogamp.org/JOGL-upgrade-fails-tp3728805p3738325.html

Hi,
  First, thanks very much for all your responses; it's great that there is such immediate feedback on questions. Sorry it took me a couple of days to react; I spent a whole day trying to put all this together and then got sidetracked with Life.

Wade:  you were right -- as soon as I added the gluegen-rt-natives-xxx.jar to my Eclipse library (and then spent a bunch of time cleaning up Eclipse run configuration paths which still pointed to my old JOGL installation even though the Built Path pointed to the new installation) it worked great.  Thanks!

However, I'm confused about something.   In previous versions of JOGL, I had to add the location of the relevant lib directories (e.g. jogl and gluegen) to my PATH.  The procedure you described (and which works) doesn't include adding the .dlls to the PATH.  What I'm confused about is how the underlying system is finding those .dlls when they're not in the PATH.  Is there something magic (defined as: anything the user doesn't understand) about how Java processes .jar files (like gluegen-rt.jar) that causes it to look for .dlls in a jar in the the same location so that they don't need to be specified in the PATH?   (I do realize this is a bit off-topic but I'm trying to get a clearer picture of how it works so I can accurately pass it on to students in classes I'm teaching using JOGL...)

Sven:  regarding your comment about perhaps needing to go back to not having separate directories for each platform: I LIKE the fact that the build system separates those things out.  It makes it a little easier if one knows that all you need for your particular platform is contained in one place -- without the overhead and confusion of having other platform stuff there as well.  I've been using JOGL for a long time (much longer than my low-level questions would seem to imply; I started with 1.1 (that is, the 1.1 that preceded the first JSR version)  and have been using it ever since.  I even fooled around a little with gl4Java
.)  In all that time, no matter how great I think JOGL is (and I think it's wonderful), my biggest issue has been the difficulty involved it getting it running each time it changes.
I think anything you guys can do to simplify the process for those who aren't involved in the build aspects and don't necessarily understand the underlying architecture and system issues but just want to download and use the system is great.

Again, thanks to everyone for the help.