Dear List members,
I have ambitions to publish Java3d models on the web for a (motivated)
general audience. Never mind whether it's practical yet. I'm working on
possible. What I'd like to do is work up a description of the process for a
visitor before he starts. My visitor probably has W95, 98, NT4, 2000 with
IE or Netscape with 1.1 support and may or may not have OpenGL.
The information on the Java3D FAQ is valuable, but the stuff there seems to
get confused among development, deployment, and end-user issues. I
certainly don't want to tell my visitor about the jdk or the HTMLConverter
or how to sign jar files, for example.
I have to say that even for a seasoned veteran, the process is desperately
difficult and uncertain. And the posted information is obfuscating in the
extreme. For example, the discussions of the relative merits of running
from the jdk/jre as opposed to the JavaSoft/jre are completely opaque. And
a search of the Forums for "Applet notinited" yields a couple of thousand
hits. The density of posts about CLASSPATH is diminishing somewhat, but
there's still a lot of pain out there. I had despaired of ever getting MY
browser running 3d, but I accidentally read Malcolm Binstead's post here
about the required locations of the support files for JBuilder running
Java3d. Ba-da-bing.
Experience using my machine is worthless, because I have a couple of jdks as
well as debris from 3 or 4 Java IDEs so I never know which version of
anything I'm running.
What can I tell my visitor before he starts? When he logs onto my carefully
handcrafted Java2/Java3d page, he's directed to Sun's download page for the
plug-in. He downloads all 5 MEGABYTES! and runs the self installer.
Does this make up the JavaSoft/jre hierarchy?
Is there a way that he can get the J3D.dll and the j3d*.jar files without
downloading Java3D?
What happens if he installs Java3D without the jdk?
Help me understand what to expect.
I promise to write up what I think is comprehensible for the FAQ.
TIA,
Fred Klingener
Brock Engineering
Roxbury CT
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