GLPBuffers and VBOs incompatible?

Where’s the command: jogl.giveMeAfreakingContextNow() !!!

I’m trying to render a bunch of images (same scene, different camera pos). Ideally i’d like to render them to an offscreen buffer and then read them back to manipulate with the CPU. I don’t need to visualise the images, just create them. I’ve been using VBOs with an onscreen buffer (based on callbacks and display() )- which works ok.

I read in a previous post about the drawing not happening if none of the windows are visble - obviously a problem. Also, the event based paradigm is not really what I want. I’d much rather be able to render an image on demand rather than waiting for callbacks.

I’ve been trying to use a GLPbuffer however I get errors when I try and create the VBOs. Specifically calling to glGenBuffer fails:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
        at com.sun.opengl.impl.gl2.GL2Impl.glGenBuffers(GL2Impl.java:4379)
        at Renderer.initOpenGL(Renderer.java:88)
        at Renderer.<init>(Renderer.java:75)
        at Run.main(Run.java:13)

The preceeding gl commands seem ok - so the GL object appears valid.

Does anyone know if there is an issue with attaching VBOs to GLPbuffer, or if there is some capability that I need to set first?