[External] : Re: JEP-412 & OpenGL

[John Rose]

On Oct 17, 2021, at 6:20 AM, Martin Pernollet <martin.pernollet at protonmail.com<mailto:martin.pernollet at protonmail.com>> wrote:

Beside these technical questions I have an historical one : 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 :)

I’m not an expert in AWT or graphics APIs but I do know a little about this history.  First, 15-20 years is so long that you shouldn’t assume today’s conditions would be at all the same.

Second, JOGL was built at a time when Sun had skunkworks projects investigating better native interoperation, similar in some ways to Panama, but Sun made a clear decision not to productize.  At the time, JNI was seen by some as kind of defensive wall for Java.  Now, not nearly so much.  In fact, now Panama’s much more welcoming stance to native code is an important side to Java.  Panama has been inspired, in part, by some of those old projects from 20 years ago.