The current plan is for the OpenGL pipeline to be disabled by default, but enabled via a command-line flag. This is due to concerns over robustness (especially with the somewhat chaotic state of GL driver support on both Linux and Windows) and performance for some operations (OpenGL tends to get incredible performance for advanced rendering features but performance for some simple operations can be less amazing due to pbuffer support and acceleration on many drivers/hardware. We're working on both of these issues, but that's why this otherwise pretty awesome hw acceleration feature will not be enabled by default...
Does this mean that applets and programs run by double-clicking a jar file won't be able to use the OpenGL pipeline, unless the user knows the command line switch (in the case of jars)? This seems like a crazy idea, considering the amount of effort going into the OpenGL pipeline. I imagine that disabling it by default will make it so that for 99% of people, the OpenGL pipeline won't be used. Most users don't want to open the command line to run a program and they don't want to have to remember -Ds.d.sdf.asd.OpenGL=true every time they run a program, and most users don't know how to modify the file association for .jar to pass in that property.
This decision makes me mad at Sun. It seems they always start something good and then mess it up, like making an OpenGL pipeline then making it so no one will use it and it's hard to enable.
Will there be a way to programmatically enable the GL pipeline or is it only a system property at startup that can do it?
I don't know the official date, and one never knows with software in any case. We should be releasing our Beta2 sometime soon, after which the next release should be the final one. As to how that equates into specific dates...
Sun says Java 1.5 final will be released in August:
* Beta 1 - Feb 2004
* Beta 2 - Apr 2004
* Release Candidate - June 2004
* FCS - Aug 2004-Keith
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