Why is (something like) Java3D important for me? It is - Java based - a scene graph library, OpenGL is too low-level for me - running on Linux - supporting off-screen rendering - supporting multiple arbitrary views (via the View/ViewPlatform classes)
I am using Java3D for a 3D web city information system which does server-side rendering and supports multiple clients, just like 'normal' web sites. While at the moment my code completely relies on Java3D for the rendering (20% of the code), I've already started to lower that coupling by building an abstraction layer to make the rendering engine exchangeable. But I would be more than happy to continue using Java3D because it just fits great. >From what I heard about Java3D's architecture over the last months I very much doubt if this is really something to start a community-driven open source project from. Too complicated, too heavy-weight. But, brave developers out there prove me wrong! Also, the target application domains (high-level visualisation, fast games, web-applets) differ in their requirements. Just remember all those performance-versus-high-level discussions. Java3D tries to satisfy all of them which led to the fact that some turned away to light-weight approaches or even from Java. Something like Xith3D seems more promising, by taking all the good parts and starting over. (Lesson learned from Mozilla?) But will those projects ever meet my feature requirements? Don't know. So, Java3D would definitively be the better choice. Bernd =========================================================================== To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff JAVA3D-INTEREST". For general help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help".
