This is the first of a number of tales you'll be seeing about j3d.org in the next few weeks. How many there will be, I don;t know - depends on what happens. Most of this I'm tossing out to give everyone an idea of where I think things should go, and to also get feedback from everyone here with suggestions - better ways of doing stuff, or other things of interest.
In far distant memory I started j3d.org as a personal hobby. Basically I was answering lots of email on the Java3D list and felt that it would be much easier for me to write everything once and stick it on a site then point everyone at that site. Steve Peitrowicz was maintiaing the FAQ at that time so we had two different focusses. Some time later, he had to move on from his work with java3D and handed the FAQ to me, which I combined with the site and things went from there.
Over the time my ability to maintain the site has been dependent on personal load. Sometimes lots of free time, others none at all for months. To help alleviate this, I wanted to bring on helpers. However, in order to keep the quality of the site high, I only approached those in the community that were seen to have a decent knowledge already. Success has varied with this - sometimes good, sometimes nothing useful has happened.
The last few months have been especially hectic. The fun of running your own company. Of course, in amongst work, all the crap that has been surrounding the future, or not, of Java3D, OpenGL bindings and everything else in the Java + 3D space has been completely overwelhming. Basically I got to a point where I figured it was better to hunker down and wait to see if any patterns emerged and then run with the trends - or against it.
With what has happened to Java3D, it is clear that j3d.org has to change. Java3D is no longer supported officially, and people are moving to other 3D alternatives, so in order to stay relevant, or perhaps become more relevant, j3d.org needs to adapt to this. That means loosing the focus on Java3D and becoming a general one-stop shop for anything in the Java and 3D graphics space.
That's a pretty big thing to bite off, and means j3d.org needs a lot of active maintainers to do anything about it. How to deal with this, I haven't worked out yet. How to get people actively maintaining it will also be a challenge. The work on the site is all completely voluntary. I certainly don't have the personal money to hire people, nor does my company get any direct funding to maintain or improve the site as it exists today. Finally, I explicitly don't want to take advertising on the site either, becuase then you run into commercial influence problems. The site has to be seen as completely unbiased.
Knowing which subjects to cover will be interesting too. Obviously we have Java3D and JOGL, but what about other areas like LWJGL or JSR184? These should be properly covered too. Finding experts in these fields that want to contribute to j3d.org and not their own local sites will be somewhat of an issue as well. For example, JavaGaming already has quite a large community of people there that don't seem to be interested in moving anywhere else.
Naturally this also has an effect on the open source code that is being maintained there too. I already have a restruture underway for this, but more will need to happen in this area too for the code to be useful to many projects. An original architecture goal was to make the codebase as independent of Java3D as possible, so extracting the common parts out will be mostly trivial.
So that's the current state of play surrounding the j3d.org site and code. More thoughts as they filter out of the noise, and if you are interested in helping out, let me know.
-- Justin Couch http://www.vlc.com.au/~justin/ Java Architect & Bit Twiddler http://www.yumetech.com/ Author, Java 3D FAQ Maintainer http://www.j3d.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- "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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