Custom shaders for JavaFX

[Richard Bair]

> 1.       What are Oracle's plans (if any) for custom shader support in
> future versions of JavaFX?

What we've been looking at is not custom shaders, but the ability to allow an application to do all its own OpenGL and give it back to us. Custom shaders might be viewed as a separate issue, such as a way to do custom Effects (which is another long-standing wouldn't-it-be-great-if). Which one are you looking for specifically?

> 2.       Is such support planned for FX9?

I'm hoping before that, in an 8 update release.

> 3.       How will the issues of supporting both OpenGL and Direct3D be
> overcome?

Don't know. One idea is to just expose a way for applications to give us a texture, and leave it up to them to give us the right kind. Sort of lame. Another is to only expose OpenGL and then have a way to use OpenGL on windows. You'd probably have to opt-in to this so that if it crashes because of bad drivers it isn't our bad. Another way is to use a mapping layer like WebGL does.

My personal view is that we only expose OpenGL and have a way to map from OpenGL to D3D on Windows.

> 4.       If any of the above are answered, has a "language" been chosen for
> defining shaders (e.g. OSL)?

I would like to be able to just use OpenGL and say GLSL is our language.

Richard