Hi everybody !
I have been using JOGL for several months. I look periodically to the Issue tracking page of JOGL. It looks still. Nothing moves, opened issues remains opened. Are there any developers working yet on JOGL, or have they stopped working on JOGL since SUN has announced a Java-OpenGL binding with J2se1.5 ? ???
Afaik, that binding is going to be (based on) jogl.
Its alive, all of the Sun people are working on getting J2SE1.5 released and those of us who are using JOGL that needed something (like swapBuffers) have patched it in our own code since we don’t have time to wait. More than likely there will be another release around GDC, but to be honest - I haven’t come across anything in the current distro outside of swapBuffer implementation that required any work. if there is something that’s keeping you from progressing, post here and someone will likely take a look at it.
I don’t bother with the community tracking pages of JOGL, JInput, or JOAL because they are of poor quality and people fix things and don’t update the status of those bugs anyways.
As a complete newbie, I too have been tracking the JOGL forum for months, trying to get an understanding of the overall direction. I have been able to convert my current work to JOGL with relative ease, and I applaud those working on the project.
However, what is ‘keeping me from progressing’ is not lack of a particular facility (e.g. swapBuffers), but more of a lack of a clear understanding of the long-term future of JOGL. It would help tremendously to have a sort of bird’s-eye view of the operation and direction of the project. As specific examples:
(1) are the people working on JOGL doing so because of a firm long-term commitment from SUN and/or SGI and/or anyone else to support it, or are they doing it for love of the project? (I’m all for love of the project, but it’s a hard thing on which to base corporate and educational decisions looking 2-5 years out).
(2) While I’m all for J2SE1.5, it’s arguably not necessary to have Tiger in order to have an idea of where the future of Java/OpenGL lies. On the other hand, it clearly is necessary to have an idea of the relationship of JOGL to OpenGL 1.5/2.0… in particular with relation to significant new developments like shaders.
Is there some information posted somewhere, that I’ve just not found, that describes the underlying support (or lack thereof) of the project, and that gives a long-term view of the project concept in the minds of the project owners? And specifically, is there any information about current or planned future support for the shader APIs?
Again, I’m a newbie; I hope my questions and comments aren’t redundant and are taken positively – I’m truly interested in knowing what the people inside JOGL really think about JOGL’s future.
[quote]I haven’t come across anything in the current distro outside of swapBuffer implementation that required any work. if there is something that’s keeping you from progressing, post here and someone will likely take a look at it.
[/quote]
I’ve raised an issue on their bug tracking, PM’ed Ken about it and mentioned the issue in the forum, yet the problem with creating a framebuffer with alpha on a linux system persists. And everytime I get a response it ends up being “…we’re looking into it now, expect a fix in the next couple of weeks”.
Yet it still persists. I havn’t been too concerned because I don’t use Linux, nor have a system to test on. But at some point its going to have to be fixed or my app is totally dead on linux systems.
Other more annoying problems I’ve had (and raised in a similar manner) also still persist, I just don’t have the time to chase up on them when I have some kind of workaround.
Jogl is overall pretty good and stable, but saying theres no activity because theres nothing to be fixed is way off the mark.
No “Added death” for me :(…
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Vendor: Orangy Tang Studios
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Unable to load resource: http://co-project.lboro.ac.uk/users/cojc5/Webstart/Library/JoglMacOSX.jar
Yeah, sorry about that. The uni webspace got hosed over xmas from the looks of things, and I havn’t got round to uploading anything other than the win32 files. I’ll try and have it fixed within the week (gotta rebuild some jars & webstart scripts because of some name changes).
[quote]Again, I’m a newbie; I hope my questions and comments aren’t redundant and are taken positively – I’m truly interested in knowing what the people inside JOGL really think about JOGL’s future.
[/quote]
The Sun folks are unfortunately just busy at the moment and many of the volunteers like myself are just squirreled away with our own projects based on the technology. The jist of it is that the JGI libraries are all open source so there isn’t a lot of reason to worry about ‘long term’ vision any more than any other solution. I’m about waist deep in UI code at the moment for tools and such, but that’s quickly coming to an end and when it is I’ll take the JGI libraries in whatever condition they are and start updating - making my changes public for anyone who wants to incorporate those changes into the JGI libraries.
Come March, I think you’ll see a sudden surge of activity with this project… though I doubt that anyone will update bug reports or anything since we don’t really have access to it to the extent that we need to in order to assign, close, kill bugs posted there.
Sit tight - interesting things are about to happen over the next 60 days for certain 
But until GDC - I’m sure many people (myself included) are just too busy with their projects to say too much.
[quote] It would help tremendously to have a sort of bird’s-eye view of the operation and direction of the project. As specific examples:
(1) are the people working on JOGL doing so because of a firm long-term commitment from SUN and/or SGI and/or anyone else to support it, or are they doing it for love of the project? (I’m all for love of the project, but it’s a hard thing on which to base corporate and educational decisions looking 2-5 years out).
[/quote]
There is at least one Sun engineer from the Games Technologies Group as project owner on all games-core projects. We are working on establishing a system of quarterly updates for all core projects. We have been writing up policies and procedures for this to ensure that it happens in a consistant manner. We hope to start this process sometime in the next 3 months.
JSR 231 (Java bindings to OpenGL) will be an optional package and not part of Tiger. It is not bound by the schedule for Tiger. The JSR is a little behind as we want to coordinate it with another as yet to be named JSR that we hope to get filed real soon now.
We also hope to come up with a release roadmap for the games-core api’s. However we also want the community to help out with roadmaps and long term views, after all these API’s are out there for you!
In summary, Sun is very committed to JOGL and all the games API’s. That’s why we have a Games Technologies Group. JOGL, in particular, will be going through the Java Community Process to become an official extension to the Java language.
d
Hi everybody,
Thank you for reacting to my question. I am quite relieved by the SUN people answers. I hope that Tiger and JOGL will be able to work together, that is to say it will be possible to draw, in the same graphic component some elements with Java2D, and others with JOGL.
I doubt very much that Tiger will allow any greater interaction with JOGL than 1.4. The OpenGL being used for acceleration image operations with Java2D is not likely to be compatible with JOGL or exposed in a way that it could be used with it.
I’ve looked at this post, and at the Java Community Process page, but am still somewhat unfamiliar with the process, so have a couple of questions.
How much change is possible (and how much is likely) between the current jogl and what will eventually make its way through the process?
thanks
andy
[quote]I’ve looked at this post, and at the Java Community Process page, but am still somewhat unfamiliar with the process, so have a couple of questions.
How much change is possible (and how much is likely) between the current jogl and what will eventually make its way through the process?
thanks
andy
[/quote]
That is really up to the expert group to decide. The goal will be to make the bindings work cross platform and also not hinder developers in their use of the OpenGL API.
Vague, I know but I suspect most of the API will remain the same.
d