Ive been on some other forums (Like ehm Xith) and I hear all this talk about how Java3d is dead, how it stopped evolving, how sun stopped its support. Etc etc. I can’t believe it’s true, at least I hope not, since I’ve put alot of coding into my current project. Also, is there an official, working version of Java3d for linux, one that works with standard Sun jvm.
Another outrageous comment I hear alot these days, is that Java itself is dead, Killed by the total superior .NET ?! :
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Java3D was in a “Holding Pattern” for a while… but it now reaffirmed with a open source project on the java.net community site. In this way its not really possible for it to die as long as there is community support.
The vote is still out on C#. We shall see. I shouldn’t imagine it’ll kill Java but it might well have a large impact on the software engineering job market as a whole.
Generally the pattern that I’m seeing with respect to migration is that currently try to program C in MSVS C++ are the prime candidates to make the move.
Kev
I escaped from vbscript to C# which was an absolute blessing.
For web development nothing else I have used comes close to .net, although PHP is very quick and easy to use and I suspect I would enjoy Python if I ever had time to do it.
Languages are academic anyways- no-one really cares what language a good application was written in- good design will out whatever language you use.
[quote]I escaped from vbscript to C# which was an absolute blessing.
For web development nothing else I have used comes close to .net, although PHP is very quick and easy to use and I suspect I would enjoy Python if I ever had time to do it.
Languages are academic anyways- no-one really cares what language a good application was written in- good design will out whatever language you use.
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Currently I’m messing around with C# and Visual Studio WEB development. One thing I cant see is how it differs from Java. True it’s very quick setting up your forms (in windows) and your webforms but thats mainly because Visual Studio is made for people who are afraid to write Code. .(not saying you are, but most VS Progammers I’v e met gets totally dependent on it and it’s ability to drag and drop) .Can’t see where the languages or the .NET platform is “better” like some say it is. Hey I’m not a MS hater, just didnt see any good arguments from the .NET people…
They just say that .NEt is going to absorb the world. Yet the average man on the street dont know what it is. Java is on more platforms. Java VM is only 5 mb, as opposed to the bloated 25mb .NET framework.
[quote]Java VM is only 5 mb
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Java 1.1 might have been only 5 mb, but the latest 1.4 or 1.5 jre are more like 15 mb.
edit: are you talking about the vm or the jre?
The actual size is 7.6 mb for JRE. 1.4.2_06…Anyway I dont think they (Microsoft) are going to be able to do to Java what they did to Netscape. After all, Java is more than just a browser. Sure they will try, they invented .NET because of Java, and to vipe out Java. Do you really think .NET will ever be platform independent ?. Maybe so, it can run on all platforms from Windows 95 to Longhorn… lol .
See Mono (In theory).
Kev
[quote]See Mono (In theory).
Kev
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Che !?
Hmm yeah. They must have upgraded it. Still it’s 8mb smaller than the .NET.
And Kev, your prop very fond of Mono and yes, it looks very cool. But don’t think for a minute that MS is not going to get that cute little project sidetracked. MS flexes it mighty muscels and snap, bye bye.
Why wouldnt they, they don’t sell any Windowe licenses off it, do they ?
Reason why they have problems doing it to Java, is because Sun and the vast java community has some muscles of it’s own.
[quote]See Mono (In theory).
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I theoretically looked at that the other day.
[quote]True it’s very quick setting up your forms (in windows) and your webforms but thats mainly because Visual Studio is made for people who are afraid to write Code. .(not saying you are, but most VS Progammers I’v e met gets totally dependent on it and it’s ability to drag and drop) .Can’t see where the languages or the .NET platform is “better” like some say it is. Hey I’m not a MS hater, just didnt see any good arguments from the .NET people.
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A lot of the features of Visual Studio work well for prototyping but if you need to work with W3C standards they start to get very obstructive. I have had to rewrite a lot of the controls to make xhtml compliant versions - I say had to I could have probably licenced some from somewhere- but if you switch to a page view and switch back Visual Studio will helpfully clear any of your self-closing tags and capitalise a bunch of stuff that isn’t supposed to be capitalised.
The really huge advantage of asp.net from our point of view is that it combines the power of java as a programming language with a very clean separation of logic and appearance and you can get it hosted pretty much anywhere. It is that last one that really makes a difference if you develop web solutions but you don’t want to host them all yourself.
Again whats the big deal ? like you said, MS tries to twist any w3c standard so it becomes a MS standard, much like they did to HTML… to shape the internet according to the IE and Windows standards. You need Windows even more then.
Again you make some interresting points in defence of .NET. You can seperate logic from appearance in any programming language. I cant see how .NET does it better than Java or Pascal for that matter. You can host Java or PHP anywhere as well and cheaper if you go Linux. If your looking for very scalable and huge solutions, you wont use Windows/SqlServer anyway, but more likely Unix or Solaris / Oracle. I dont think they build google around Windows 2000 !. Again, I need stronger arguments. So far didnt get any, which im kind of glad for. After the initial .NET hysteria has died, people will screw their head on , start thinking again then toss the crap out the Window and return to Java . Another thing is, why the hell do they call it .NET Framework ? A bunch of classes is not a framework, its just that, a bunch of classes.
Very few isps host java on virtual servers, which is where most of our clients’ sites are hosted and those that do charge more for it because they are fewer and further between.
Pretty much everyone hosts .net on windows.
I’m not saying it is especially better than any other language- as I’ve mentioned before I’m pretty much language-agnostic - but it is very convenient to work with. Because we combine design and programming a lot it turns out that practically we can work faster in .net than in any other language we have tried. We haven’t tried every language, obviously, but in the end the tool that gets the job done most quickly makes the most business sense and at the moment that’s C# and .net where I work.
I disagree about sql server as an enterprise-level tool- it is as good as any other top-level enterprise database and by the standards of such things it’s not outrageously expensive. Once you get to the really big stuff you probably shouldn’t be on windows because of the security thing, but the database is fine…
I’m still here because I understand Java3D better than any other 3d environment and for games-writing purposes I think the platform independance thing is really valuable. From a personal point of view I would rather be using non-M$ tools but I have no logical reason for that- it’s all sentiment and whimsy…
No! And it will not be as long as we all contribute and promote it! ;D 
>:( 
:o 8) ??? : 
:-[ :-X :-/ :-* :’(
[quote]Ive been on some other forums (Like ehm Xith) and I hear all this talk about how Java3d is dead, how it stopped evolving, how sun stopped its support.
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Sun tried to do to 3D what they did to Swing. Which was a big mistake. The 3D performance and hardware at the time lacked to make up for the bad 3D pipeline in Java3D. So it could run anywhere, but not very well.
Finally they placed the developer to high up over the Java3D API preventing them from being able to do a lot of 3D applications people come to think of when they think “3D”. For example: 3D video games, 3D drafting and design, and 3D visualization. All these need a different rendering solution, and no one solution can be perfect in all cases.
Bias alert: I hated Java3D. It’s like Visual Basic for 3D programmers. We finally have access to OpenGL bindings, and this going to be the future of 3D on the Java platform.
[quote]Another outrageous comment I hear alot these days, is that Java itself is dead, Killed by the total superior .NET ?! : :
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The problem with .NET is that it’s not a technology. It’s a “brand name” for most of Microsoft’s products. For example (Access .NET, SQL .NET, Fortran .NET, C# .NET, Word .NET). When you compare Java (a technology) with the worlds largest software company’s line of products the scale is going to tip to one side with a crash.
When thinking in terms of Java you have to remember that Sun has always been an “out of the box” solution provider. Releasing products that no one else has, and it’s a smaller company. How many companies the size of Sun have this many developers using their products? Maybe Borland or a couple of others, but you could most likely count them on one hand. Now, stop and see how scared Microsoft is, how much people talk about .NET vs Java, and you’ll begin to see who is the trend setter, and the follower.
It doesn’t matter if .NET becomes the next “big” thing, because Sun is working on the next new thing. Try to remember how many years Microsoft developers were forced to write applications in C++ using the old Win32 API. Microsoft just can’t change quickly, and the amount of increased features in Java 1.0 to 1.5 beats out most work done by Microsoft in the last 8 years. Microsoft’s .NET isn’t new it’s just them catching up to what the industry is expecting as solutions in development. In order for .NET to be successful it has to be amazing. Else, people will point the finger at Microsoft and say “you idiots you did it again”. While people will always be talking about Sun saying “Wow, look what’s coming now”.
So I say to Microsoft. Bring it on! Mother f###er. ;D
[quote]Sun tried to do to 3D what they did to Swing. Which was a big mistake. The 3D performance and hardware at the time lacked to make up for the bad 3D pipeline in Java3D. So it could run anywhere, but not very well.
Finally they placed the developer to high up over the Java3D API preventing them from being able to do a lot of 3D applications people come to think of when they think “3D”. For example: 3D video games, 3D drafting and design, and 3D visualization. All these need a different rendering solution, and no one solution can be perfect in all cases.
Bias alert: I hated Java3D. It’s like Visual Basic for 3D programmers. We finally have access to OpenGL bindings, and this going to be the future of 3D on the Java platform.
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I think you’ve got confused between J3D and something weird you once had a dream about. Java3D uses OpenGL or DirectX and it always has done. It is designed for 3D Visualisation and drafting and design rather than gaming but that doesn’t mean it can’t be used for writing games- if it couldn’t this particular forum might be a little bit pointless. It has absolutely no similarity to Visual Basic in any way that I can think of. Either you’re writing so far from what you know that you can’t even see the lighthouses or you’re trolling.
OpenGL bindings are fine if you like the idea of reinventing the wheel for the thousandth time- something which seems to make a lot of people happy- but to achieve much with them you need to build something on top of them. Java3d is one of those somethings.
IM!HO, Java3D is in many ways, ahead of its time. It was designed to support 3D caves, stereo glasses, and other high-end hardware, as well as single-display PC hardware. It is being used in lots of places for scientific and commercial use, and was not intended solely for game development.
You can certainly write games with Java3D – my group is doing so. We have considered switching to other APIs several times, but the other ones just don’t seem to be up to what we need (yet). Will our game be rendered as fast as it would be if we did it in jogl or lwjgl? Probably not, but we are capping the framerate at 60 fps anyways, and we are not developing a fast-paced game. Would we be as far along as we are now in development? almost certainly not, since we have limited bandwidth to reinvent the wheel, and we are pretty much using Java3D for the things it is good at.
My belief is that Java3D will come more and more into its own as the available hardware gets faster and faster and people start to adopt more complex viewers like stereo glasses. I don’t think it will ever match the dedicated game APIs in pure performance, because of the overhead of its multithreaded architecture, but in the meantime it can certainly be good enough. It depends a lot on what kind of game you are making and how much you want to dig into the internals versus actually making a game.
Anyways, that’s my $0.02
LOL. Indeed, mustang was being a bit strange with that one :).
Anyway…for me, the decider is that sun will not put sound back into Java3D. Yet it’s in the API. It just doesn’t work.
I’ve never tried to use the J3d sound stuff but everyone seems to agree it’s rubbish. Perhaps this will be the first thing to improve with the new-fangled Open Source J3d…