Because every graphcis cards needs its own OpenGL.
Its actually the graolhics card vendors that support OGL on Win32.
BUT if MSFT can convicne them their OGL to D3D wrapper is “good enough”, they will drop OGL support. And OGL on Win32 will die.
Exactly. Which is why it woudl be foolish to drop it.
I totally dont get this statmenet. What do you mean “good integration with windows”. What sets J3D apart today is (a) its free (b) its standardized © its open source and (d) it runs on either OGL or D3D on Win32, plus Linux, OSX and SOlaris. Various other alternatvoes have various combinations of those features.
I don’t understand what point you are trying to make here?
You are naive.
MSFT sells their crappy OS because its the only thing that runs the apps people want to run. They keep control of the apps by keeping control of the APIs the apps are coded to. OGL is the ONLY important API on WIndows today they don’t control.
They hate it. They want it gone.
There CAN’T be a Windows version maintained by the consortium due to Microsoft paying SGI $62.5 million for the OGL patents back in 2002. Jeff is correct, the only way they control their platfomr is by holding the APIs close and keeping the most important ones closed. This is exactly why technologies like Cedega have so many problems. They can’t see directly what Direct X is doing under the covers so they, instead, observe the actions of said APIs which is why you can’t just run any DX game under Cedega. They have to watch the API activity for each individual game they make compatable with their technology.
This, BTW, is the big stink in the courts. Microsoft refuses to open up their APIs to increase compatability with 3rd party apps. The only reason, imo, that OGL is still around is due to the possibility of “anti-competitive” suits and the fact that so many legacy apps still in use today (think military visualization applications, topographic systems, etc.) that can’t be ported due to their massive code base. That and there are still plenty of games developed today that depend on OGL 
One last thought…do you see anywhere in Microsoft’s XNA roadmap a place for OGL? I don’t think so…
Can you confirm that Java3D runs on Direct3D even after 1.3.1? There’s no special download in later versions so I assumed it was removed.
I find this in Issue 141,
So I guess Java3D still supports Direct3D. Good. After Sun let Java3D lay dormant for years I’ve been suspicious against it but I’ll give Java3D another try now.
Well, the more important then that Java offers solutions on Windows that aren’t OpenGL based.
Java3D seems to fit the bill because it optionally can render using Direct3D I’ve learned. That should be a real argument for using Java3D if you’re targeting Windows. It’s the only Java scenegraph supporting Direct3D isn’t it? If Microsoft plans to suppress OpenGL it’s too bad for software that’s using it including Java games built on JOGL, Xith and whatever.
I’m writing this to check my arguments and the implications: If you’re targeting Microsoft with a 3D graphics application you’ll probably do best if you avoid OpenGL altogether and go for XNA/Direct3D. The only available Java scenegraph/renderer with such an option is Java3D. Is that right?
Your forgetting Quake.
John Carmack has done more to keep OGL alive on Windows IMHO then any other man on earth.
Unfortunately its fairly well established that his next game will in fact be D3D based.
Well it depend on how far out you are looking and how critical speed is to you. This is my personal “best guess” at the future. It may not be right…
In the very near term, there is still strong support from the card makers for OGL.
In the medium term, when Vista come out, IF this latest strategy of Microsoft’s succeeds, then support will start to fall off and instead you will have to use Micrsoft’s D3D wrapper. This is likely to cost you some speed but if its TOO crappy then they wont be able to disuade the card makers from doing their own so its likely it wont be TOO much slower then D3D.
At some point if MSFT is totally successful, the graphics cards companies will be totaly “weened” from OGL and at that point you can expect MSFT to start purposefully sabaotaging their OGL (most likely form will not be keeping up with new features and generally letting the code rot.)
Once they have the software developers they care about all pushed over to D3D, they’ll drop OGL all together.
This is wrong too, by the way.
It was almost exactly one year that J3D development was on hold.
More important though then Sun resumign active development IMHO was the decision to open source it.
While its certainly verynice to have Sun paying for some development, it is no longer as critically necessary as it was. Should management stop active development of J3D again, the community now has the options of going on without us.
Well, as a Sun employee you’re expected to bad-mouth the competition, but wasn’t it part of the deal when Microsoft paid you this huge pile of money that you direct further animosities towards IBM? Maybe your post should be considered a kind of retro-bashing, a nostalgic relapse to the good old times when Microsoft was the baddest of the bad blamable for every wrongdoing in the known universe and beyond. ;D
Sure and the time went by so quickly one almost didn’t notice. Effectively it cannot have been more than a week really, if even that! ;D
ROFLOL you really ARE a N00b here aren’t you?
Ask the folks who have been here awhile how much I subscribe to “official sun lines.”
I speak the engineering truth as I have experienced it. I have done a LOT of Win32 in my day and its over built, buggy shit. Only MSFT could proudly announce on the realease of an OS that they had FIXED 50,000 bugs. Which is exactly what they did when they released XP.
As for MSFT’s industry tactics. They are extremely well documented and anyone who has done much work outside of the little huddle that is micro-softies knows them. This is why they are still in anti-trust trouble in Europe, where the authorities cannot be handled by just throwing money at a right wing candidate’s campaign and/or throwing money at the court system to stall things until a favorable political climate arises. (or both)
On business level, again I think you are being naive. In my personal opinion what you see in public today is a temporary marriage of convenience. Today, Sun doesn’t know how to get on to the desk top and Microsoft is having a hard time penetrating the server room. BOTH of our customers want the one to talk to the other, so we try to cooperate at least that far for the sake of all our sales.
Make no mistake however, to both companies the other is currently a necessary evil.
Oh, and I can’t say anything about IBM OS’s because I have never actually had to program VM…
From my experience with IBM’s other products IBM certainly does have the smarts to write good software. They build an excellent Java VM and thats hard to do well. If I were going to “bash” IBM I’d just say that there is a reason “Business” is their middle name. If you have a big business problem, and deep big business pockets, then IBM can certainly be a reasonable solution. But they certainly aren’t cheap and when you go Big Blue you go ALL blue. One of Sun’s main distinctions is that we do a lot more to integrate with third parties then IBM ever has.
And just to be clear, because you DO seem confused on this point:
[i]All the opinions expressed above (or anywhere else on this board) are solely those of Jeffrey Peter Kesselman and are not to be construed in any way as representing Sun’s corporate opinions or the opinions of anyone else at Sun.[/i]
(And I think we’ve probably drifted a little far afield in this thread…)
Oh, and Im not sure I like the implication here that even Sun’s official opinions were “bought off.”
If you check the records you will find that MSFT paid us that “huge sum of money” as a settlement on our anti-trust suit for the way they tried to kill Java.
Granted, it can be speculated that the reason they finally settled was to clear the air for talks about our future relationship. Those would have been a lot more difficult with litigation in progress at the time.
Yes I’m a newbie but I’ve been using humor for a long time. To make sure that was understood I put in the biggest smiley available. ;D
But of course there’s a serious undercurrent. I find company bashing of the Good vs. Evil kind extremely childish. I also think blame should be put where it’s due. Why downplay Sun’s long neglectance of Java3D?
Anyway thanks for the discussion. I’ve come to the conclussion that Java3D still probably is my best option. JOGL is very low level and OpenGL doesn’t seem to fit into Microsoft’s strategy. Xith is based on JOGL and the Java3D specification. Xith may be more efficient today but that doesn’t seem to be an established fact and the time works for Java3D because of the introduction of multicore processors that will handle the threading better.
I can only hope Java3D will be kept efficient, bugfree and available on many platforms including very soon the 64-bit ones. A reasonable aim I think would be to support everything Eclipse supports. In my view the only strategic advantage of Java over C# is the portability, so it’s important that Java3D doesn’t restrict application portability (who wants a Porta Restrictor to strange their application? :)).
/Ulrika
First, this ad-hominemn attack. One of the 5 standard fallacies of proaganda and a sure sign someone hjas no real intelligent arguments left to make.
Second of all, this has nothing to do wuth company v. company. This has everything to do with MSFTs actions in the market over the past 20 years and the quality of their OS.
And as I’ve decided you are a troll, AFAICS this is officially
PLONKED
Well you ARE a Sun employee aren’t you?
What do you call this: “MSFT sells their crappy OS”? I call it bad-mouthing the competition.
You also did downplay Suns behaviour regarding Java3D by trying to establish 1 year as the time-period Sun left people hanging. It was a far longer period Java3D was in decline. After version 1.3.1 it took something like 2 years to recover and deliver 1.3.2.
So now you’ve decided I’m a troll right. Isn’t that one of those personal attacks you’re accusing me of? To retribute that I’m going to declare you a troll too. You’re one of those trolls who take themeselves far too seriously. Be careful. If you suck in more air you may explode!
* cylab grabs a pile of popcorn and leans back ;D
But seriously… what’s the problem? Just opinions, ehh?
@ .uj
you really should not misinterpret a personal opinion with a corporate one, regardless who is the employer of an individual…
@Jeff
.uj had a point, you really are bad-mouthing against Windows ;). I for myself like Windows and I think it’s a much less crappy OS than everyone says. On the other hand I don’t like MSFTs marketing strategy…
The only people that think Windows isn’t crappy are people that tried to use Linux as an alternative.
Consider the resources available to Microsoft. Now consider that the Windows File Explorer, the primary interface to the OS (explorer.exe) still doesn’t update the tree view properly when you do a basic operation like create or delete a directory. Or consider the progress dialog for copy operations that might as well use a random number generator for the “estimate time remaining”. Or the fact that the built-in support to “un-zip” takes an order of magnitude longer to uncompress a zip archive than any of the free utilities that unzip (e.g. time unziping eclipse.zip with explorer.exe right-click vs. any other tool). Consider how agonizingly slow it is to simply use explorer.exe to list a directory (particularly a network directory) even compared to the command line on the same OS. Consider the broken filesystem that thinks access to C:\myProgram\myConfigFiles\com1.xml is trying to access the serial port! Consider the virtual memory system that does the opposite of what virtual memory systems are supposed to do and actively works to keep everything in secondary storage instead of RAM!
That Windows sucks is a universal truth, it isn’t an opinion any more than 2+2=4 is. :).
[quote]The only people that think Windows isn’t crappy are people that tried to use Linux as an alternative.
[/quote]
;D cannot not argue against this…
I base my opinion towards Windows on how good I get my tasks done. At this point I might miss the problems since I spend 70% of my time in idea or netbeans, 20% in cygwin bash and 10% in Outlook/Office… so I notice problems about 10% of my working time 
Kesselman’s OS contentions
(1) ANY OS that fails underneath me and has to be reinstalled on a regular basis is shit
When is the last time you heard of someone having to do that with Solaris? or IBM’s VM? or even Linux?
(2) Any OS that claims to be multi-threaded but cannot handle multi-threaded calls to its most fundemental structures (the GUI system, DirectX, etc) is shit.
Again, when have you seen that limitation in ANY other OS that dares to call itself multi-threaded?
(3) Any OS which is relased with better then 50,000 bugs is DEFINITELY shit and MSFT admitted as much when they said they FIXED 50,000 bugs in 2K when they released XP.
Im not talking about user experience here. Thsi isnt a user experience forum. This is a coder’s forum.
And the only coders who think Win32 isnt shit are the ones who have never coded a singificant app in a better enviornment. Which means almost any other environment.
Myself I’ve coded in Unix (multiple flavors), Linux, MacOS, OSX, OS/9 and AmigaOS.
Of ALL of those the only one that comes close to being as frustrating is OS/9 but even it is a whole lot less outright buggy.
Here endeth the lesson