That raises a scary point. What if Sun woke up one day and decided to
"discontinue" Java3d? Is this a real possibility? Justin did you get any
sense how Sun views Java3d in their long term plans?
Dave Yazel
----- Original Message -----
From: Justin Couch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, September 26, 2000 11:53 PM
Subject: Re: [JAVA3D] Java3d issues
> David wrote:
> It "feels" like Sun is not committed to making Java3d a true
> alternative to other 3d libraries. Why do I say this?
All these points and more I ear bashed Kevin Rushforth with - and the
local Sun marketing reps - back in early July when they were over here.
I was fortunate enough to spend a couple of hours with Kevin having a
good chat one to on without the marketroids interfering. He's patently
aware of the problems now and I'm glad a few others are starting to rant
and too. Perhaps the message will finally get through.
As you say, Open Sourcing the code is probably the best fix for it. In
general, the engineers within Sun would really like to do it, it is
middle level management that won't let it out the door. For example, 12
months ago Sun stopped supporting JSDT. Since then, Rich Burridge, the
engineer working on the project and now technical lead of Mozilla on
Solaris, has been trying to get them to release the source code to me
under the LGPL. Local managers etc all agree, but about 3 or 4 levels up
they just say no without any consideration every time it comes up.
Even if it can't be OSS, then how about very quick release schedules.
Construct a developer area that houses nightly or weekly build of the
code. Every so often, go through a full test process (not that it feels
like the Sun code currently does that) and put a formal version number
on it. At least that way those of us willing to sit on the bleeding edge
can test their code and give it much greater feedback.
The alternative to this is to build our own OSS implementation of the
API and keep it unofficial. I'm very happy to devote some development
time and all of the server space/resources I can muster for such a
project.
Shawn Kendall, As you lead a set of students, would this be an
interesting project for them to work on? I'm thinking here that there
are a *heap* of great teaching points about how to build a scenegraph
and then how that effects an optimised low level coding, sort routines,
that sort of thing. As none of us can afford to pay for the JCK it would
remain unofficial, but then look at what Mesa has done to OpenGL.
--
Justin Couch Author, Java Hacker
http://www.vlc.com.au/~justin/ Java 3D FAQ Maintainer
http://www.j3d.org/ J3D.org The Java 3D Community Site
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"Humanism is dead. Animals think, feel; so do machines now.
Neither man nor woman is the measure of all things. Every organism
processes data according to its domain, its environment; you, with
all your brains, would be useless in a mouse's universe..."
- Greg Bear, Slant
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