Monday, September 13, 2010

Do you want 3D in Eclipse?

Unfortunately, we were informed that the JOGL library has failed to get IP approved just like LWJGL due to severe licensing problems (see CQ2817 and GQ2840 for further details; IPZilla account needed). To summarize, LWJGL cannot be approved as it contains non BSD code or code with unknown license or provenance and JOGL cannot be approved as “we have been unable to locate an individual within Sun/Oracle to help us with JOGL”, as Janet Campbell wrote when closing the CQ. In this context we'd like to thank Janet and Barb for all their hard work!

What this means for Eclipse is that, even though it is technically possible to use 3D / OpenGL within Eclipse, there is no way to create self-contained Eclipse plugins that require OpenGL. Such plugins would always have to rely on external update sites, which complicates the installation process. Such update sites also depend on third party support and may or may not be available in future releases. For GEF3D, this is really bad news, but it also is a problem for all other 3D related projects.

The only option appears to be to create a new Eclipse project for OpenGL bindings. Some work has been done in the SWT project itself, but the code has since been abandoned. Unfortunately, writing OpenGL bindings for Java is not a simple job due to inconsistencies and driver incompatibilities. Jens wrote GEF3D in the context of his Ph.D. thesis, and we both were paid by the FernUniversität in Hagen. Additionally, we spent a lot of our spare time on GEF3D. We both are still interested in GEF3D, but unfortunately our current work is not really 3D related. That is, we both are no longer paid for maintaining GEF3D. This would be OK to a certain degree, but frankly none of us is keen on writing a new OpenGL wrapper library on our own without any salary.

So, we'd like to know whether we are alone in our effort to bring 3D to Eclipse: Do you want 3D (i.e. OpenGL) in Eclipse? And if you do, what are your thoughts on this situation? As this is not a simple yes/no question, please leave us a comment.

Jens and Kristian

Technical Note: OpenGL is required for almost all 3D applications, and high-level libraries such as the JMonkeyEngine or Aviatrix3D use OpenGL (i.e. LWJGL or JOGL) under the hood. Technically, OpenGL can be easily used in SWT applications thanks to the GLCanvas class. However, a Java wrapper library is needed for calling OpenGL functions. As far as we know, only two such libraries are available: LWJGL and JOGL. At http://www.eclipse.org/swt/opengl/, gljava is listed as well, however, this project is no longer maintained. The same is true for the org.eclipse.opengl bindings. There exists a plugin for JOGL, and another for LWJGL. The plugin for LWJGL has been written in the context of GEF3D and has been maintained by the LWJGL team for quite a while (they have changed their build system, so the LWJGL plugin is no longer maintained at the moment, however the update site is still available).