java3d on osx.. revival or  not ?

Engines, Libraries and Tools Java 3D
#1

i’ve been, as many of us, surprised by the sudden release of J3D on OSX. We’ve been asking that for years and got nothing until lately. i was suprised that this release came after the sort of announce for j3d’s freezing. what the hell was running in the background? Were the (secret/unknown/drWho) plans of Doug finally becoming reality?
Did apple finally pushed enough out of the todo stack to get to do that?
I was also intrigued by the simultaneous release of j3d and JAI. those two APIs are rarely used toguether, and apple releases them both in the same package.

Time passed…

Yesterday, i came to the maestro website and thought… ’ heh, nice that j3d and JAI came out just before the robot landed… OSX users can have that nice thing also, now…" then, there was a 2 seconds silent in my mind… you see, the one that makes you feel like a dumb ass…
Then, it became clear to me that Apple’s release perfectly fit the rover purpose. I took time to think to the release of the APIs, and what followed… clearly, nothing after the release… nothing on the J3D (ashes of a ) group, nothing anywhere…
wasn’t the release there only for that purpose? If so, who decided (Jobs, MCNealy, …) and who paid? Will there be nothing more, as always?

“So what?”, you might ask…

Well, i wonder if such an application can make new ports happen, what would make j3D alive again ? If those stone giant can move, as we saw, how can we keep the movement going , if ever it is possible without funding a mission to an other planet…
Whatever the kinda-lookslike-following-replacement j3d projects that appeared recently, none fits my needs or has the same advantages and i’d love to see j3d continuing with up to date features.

#2

I don’t think the NASA app had anything to do at all with the release of J3D on Mac.

I think that there were technical issues with the windowing system and how it worked with Java AWT that were solved in OS X 10.3 and Java 1.4.1 update 1 and that things became easier for the port with those changes in place.

You will recall that update 1 to Java 1.4.1 on OS 10.2 was needed just to run JOGL, and that initially JOGL was only going to work well on Panther (10.3) because the native links to Java AWT needed something to work efficiently - the Java 1.4.1 update 1 contained some of the needed changes.

#3

You are partially correct on the application causing ports thing. We work with a number of different sections of NASA and the confirmed back story that we got from it was that the port had nothing to do with the Rover project, but another one from within NASA. They had a large hardware purchase requirement, and one item on the Must Support list was Java3D due to a number of internal applications that are running, using it. In order for Apple to be in the running for that contract, they had to have Java3D support publically available. Hence the reason you see this port coming out now.

#4

Is it truly the reason, or was Apple working on it anyway? I wonder. I don’t doubt that it provided some “encouragement” though. :slight_smile:

#5

Thanks Mithrandir for the information.
The release was too weird just to be a good will from Apple., just for the community, or something not directly related to sales.

Now, Nasa needs to get sun machines and ask for a continuous update of j3D, or at least a release of the 1.4 specs, so people can implement it. :stuck_out_tongue: