Hardware accelerated Java applets to break in Mac OS X update?!

[Mr_Gol]

Apple’s developer website currently contains a preview release of their next update. In the release notes the following is mentioned:

Plugin2 now renders cooperatively with the browser via CoreGraphics, which allows Java content to be seamlessly interleaved with other DOM elements on the page. This is a change from earlier updates, where an overlay window was clipped and repositioned to make the Java applet track the browser window. The older model couldn’t allow page elements to float on top of Java content, and also captured events which would often result in the browser window deactivating.

Since rendering now occurs off-screen, hardware accelerated technologies like JOGL and Java3D are no longer able to attach their content by grabbing a pointer to the underlying window. When Plugin2 and the Java AWT are able to render into a CoreAnimation layer, it will be possible to vend an OpenGL context backed by a sub-layer. However, each of these 3D technologies must be modified to use a new method to obtain that OpenGL context. Browser support for the CoreAnimation NPAPI rendering model will also be required.

As I understand this basically means that all applets using LWJGL, JOGL or Java 3D are going to break once this update is released.

[princec]

I imagine we’ll get a fix in for LWJGL as soon as possible, but… that is rather irritating. Will said fix work on a “plugin1” Java deployment as well as “plugin2”? Grr

Cas

[kappa]

hmm strange, why can’t apple just use the standard java plugin2 like everyone else? or better submit their changes to be merged with the official plugin2.

still not sure how they can pull this off without breaking AWT, would be nice however if someone can confirm that it does indeed break JOGL/LWJGL applets.

[Mr_Gol]

@princec

Will said fix work on a “plugin1” Java deployment as well as “plugin2”?

The proposed solution mentions Core Animation (which was introduced in OS X 10.5), so no if you want to support older Macs.

[princec]

but but but… AFAIK there’s basically an AWT/JNI interface that’s what allows us to get the “HDC” or whatever it’s called on MacOS, which allows us to get GL contexts etc etc. If they just go breaking that interface’s semantics then surely quite a lot of dependent code is going to break - not just LWJGL. I mean, there are probably a lot of other places that use Java in-house to do things and have a handle on the native windowing systems through JNI.

This is all very odd.

Cas