A little news on recent JOGL development. Probably the most interesting to most people is that the glext.h and associated header files JOGL uses have been updated to OpenGL 2.1 with NVidia’s GeForce 8 series extensions. We have finally also put some featured projects on the JOGL home page. Please send email if you would like your project to be listed.
A few old bugs and RFEs have been fixed. The developer build bundles have been changed to zip archives, so instead of having to download multiple jars, you can now just download the zip archive for your particular platform. The new zip archives are versioned with the build date. The source distribution now contains the generated sources like GL.java, GLU.java, etc. for more convenient use in IDEs. The chosen GLCapabilities are now exposed from the GLDrawable; this functionality works on all platforms even in cases where the GLCapabilitiesChooser is not supported, and attempts to provide correct answers so programs can make decisions based on the results. The native code for the “DRI hack” (to support the open-source DRI drivers on Linux and other X11 platforms) has been removed; JOGL now uses the GlueGen NativeLibrary class for this purpose. The JOGL applet launcher has been updated for the change in native library structure and as soon as we push signed binaries the example applet and documentation will be updated as well.
The nightly build on the JOGL home page reflects these changes. The base version number will be bumped to 1.1.0 in tomorrow’s build. We will submit the revised javadoc to the JCP next week to begin the maintenance process for revising the JSR-231 spec for the new APIs. We will also post Java Web Startable binaries (replacing the jsr-231-webstart-current ones) once we have done some more testing.
Finally, in the near future, a text rendering class will be added to the com.sun.opengl.util package to make it easier to draw strings using Java2D fonts with OpenGL.
Please post if you have any questions, comments or suggestions.