I believe that many of us greatly appreciate what Sun has provided in
Java 3D. I don't think Justin, myself or any of the other "veterans"
mean any disrespect for the Sun engineers. The Sun engineers have been
helpful and provide the best support I've seen for a product (I'd prefer
to hear "that's fixed in the next release" a bit less often though).
Java 3D does suffer from an incredible lack of documentation (I'd say
the same thing about Java in general).
Justin, that's interesting to hear that Sun's engineers were so
forthright with you. It's not surprising though as Java 3D "feels" just
as you described... it's an aquired skill... you either bash your own
way through it or pray you have a more experienced person to help show
you the ropes.
Overall I find Java 3D performs very well and is easy to work with.
It's not hard to "push the envelope" though. What I see in this mailing
list is a mixture of the novice questions (what should be in a basic
tutorial), experts pushing beyond reasonable usage (might as well code
directly to the OpenGL API) and the rest are a lot of questions asking
for the documentation that should be there in the first place.
In writing the 3DS loader that we released, a critical aspect in my
opinion was providing useful documentation. And although I believe I've
provided an easy to use tool and I believe I've provided clearer and
more extensive documentation than Sun does, I *still* get e-mails for
support and questions. Documentation is not easy to produce (it's very
time consuming).
Sun... do you see the pattern? Documentation, documentation,
documentation. It is not possible to produce too much documentation.
But it is easy to produce a pile of garbage (the toughest part of
documentation is organizing it and eliminating extra "drivel"). If a
behavior isn't obviously intuitive to everyone that is using it then it
MUST be documented. Trial and error is a lousy way to learn an API...
but it's a huge part of real life... learning Java, learning Java 3D or
anything else is filled with learning by mistakes.
Of the time that I've spend on our projects very little has been actual
"Java 3D". Dealing with other aspects of Java (including the nightmare
installation and distribution issues) and pondering just how this "black
box" of Java 3D really works consumes more time than writing Java 3D
code.
Still, who are we to complain? Java and Java 3D are free products and
Sun should be appreciated (not bashed) for providing them.
- John Wright
Starfire Research
Karen & Justin - our projects have always used custom picking based
collision detection (we never wasted any time trying to even make Sun's
"collision detection" useful).
Justin Couch wrote:
>
> Karen Dias wrote:
>
> > Can't a person get the source for Java 3D & if so,
>
> FAQ question #2 - simple answer: no
>
> > what would be the
> > rational for hiding what the collision detection algorithm does? I'm a
> > robotics engineer and for my applications IT DOES MATTER what the collision
> > detection algorithm does.
>
> Yup. Please take a number and wait for it to be called....
>
> There are *many* people wanting documentation of _everything_. I know
> the Sun guys are going to hate me for this, but talking to them last
> week revealed some extremely frightening revelations. Even internally
> they do not have architecture documents. Each new programmer coming to
> work on the code has to be given the introductory speach about the code
> by one of the old time programmers. There is not a single document that
> allows them to sit down and have a rough idea what is going on before
> starting. Then, once programming, there is no documentation within the
> code either.... It's a bloody wonder that things work at all with such
> shoddy engineering practices. Honestly if one of my engineers gave me
> code like that I would throw it back in their face telling them to not
> bother with it until it was properly documented.
>
> So, if Sun doesn't know what it's own code is doing, I doubt you have
> even got a hope of getting something from them!
>
> > I guess from what I've read here that if I decide to use Java 3D for my
> > application, I'll probably be stuck writing my own collision detection code.
>
> Yes, you and everyone else. For all intents and purposes, J3D's
> collision detection system is useless.
>
> --
> 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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