Addding OpenGL support to Java 17 with JEP-412

[Martin Pernollet]

Hi everyone,

I created and maintained Jzy3D framework allowing to create simple 3D and 2D charts in Java. It is currently using JOGL to access OpenGL and render in AWT, Swing, SWT, etc. JOGL is about to die unfortunatelly so I am studying if and how JEP-412 could be an alternative. I am somehow not in a hurry since I added a CPU fallback OpenGL renderer [1] that does a great job for simple surface/scatter/etc charts. Access to native OpenGL however remains important for fast rendering of large geometries as well as support for modern OpenGL using VBO, shaders, etc.

JEP-412 is promising, I got great examples already working on my mac [2] and I started evaluating this on Windows.

However, before diving in the huge project of building a JOGL-like library, I would like to understand what happened in the history of Sun Microsystem with OpenGL if some of you know it : JOGL was initially created by Sun and I presume Java3D relied on it when it was released in 1998. Java3D was dropped in 2004 from JDK and JOGL was given to the community. Does someone know what the reasons were? I fear writing something similar to what was done 20 years ago would fail the same way.

[1] https://github.com/jzy3d/jzy3d-api/tree/master/jzy3d-emul-gl-awt
[2] https://github.com/jzy3d/panama-gl