Exposing native surface or opengl handle

[Felix Bembrick]

I absolutely agree that such a feature is critical for the success and
longevity of JavaFX.  I am *really* hoping for some heavily beefed-up 3D
support in a JFX 8.* release or JFX 9.

I need my graphics toolkit (currently JavaFX) to be able to handle
everything from simple UIs with basic controls to complex 3D
visualisations, just like the underlying graphics API is capable of (i.e.
OpenGL or Direct3D).  I strongly suspect though that focusing on OpenGL
exclusively is the only viable way to go from a cost perspective which
would mean JavaFX supporting OpenGL on Windows.


On 13 June 2014 16:57, Robert Krüger <krueger at lesspain.de> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> it has been discussed a number of time in the passed but let me
> quickly summarize:
>
> A number of people have requested a feature that provides the ability
> to have native code draw into a surface provided by a JavaFX
> application as fast as technically possible, i.e. with no indirection
> or copying because use cases for this were mostly cases where
> performance was critical, e.g. HD/UHD video players, real-time
> visualization etc. where losing even e few percent would make a
> software written in JavaFX unable to compete with native products
> (e.g. in the video area nobody will use a video player that is not
> able to play the content smoothly that VLC player or Quicktime can on
> the same machine). Some people already have libraries of native code
> that they have built over the years and would like to reuse. I would
> even go so far to say that our product will probably never be able to
> move to JFX (apart from mixing it a bit with Swing, which we currently
> see rather aa a migration strategy and not as the end result) without
> this problem solved.
>
> In the past the reactions/signals from the Oracle team in this respect
> were mixed but some of it indicated that this topic was discussed in
> the past and might be revisited after the release of JFX 8. Now that
> the latter has happened I would like to ask what the plans for this
> are.
>
> Is there a Jira Issue where we can track the progress of it?
>
> If not, does it make sense if I open one, so people (probably the same
> ones that have participated in these discussions in the past like
> Scott and the Ultramixer guys etc.) can collect their
> requirements/thoughts?
>
> Even if Oracle should decide not to do something about it, it would
> still be nice to get pointers in the code base to where this would be
> possible, even if it is non-portable. I know that for our product it
> would be totally OK to have different ways of doing this for each
> platform and to live with the limitation to not be able to manipulate
> the result in the FX scene graph apart from that the position of the
> surface moving with the hosting FX node and as far as I have
> understood others, it is the same for them.
>
> Maybe a Jira issue could also be a good place to bundle information
> about approaches interested parties are willing to pursue.
>
> Thoughts anyone?
>
> Robert
>