So, there's a happy ending to this thread after all. It turns out that the more recent nightly builds _do_ work on 10.3 with Java 1.4.2 Update 1 (Developer Preview).   With just plain old 1.4.2, you may run into an exception involving AWT and the fact that the 1.4.1 java version has been removed entirely.   I resolved this by making the appropriate link in my Frameworks directory, but since the problem goes away with the latest update, I'd recommend just using the newest Apple JVM.
 Thanks to everyone for all your help.

fhmiv, thanks for the pointer on the new java tools, I had missed that one.  It looks like I'll still need to compile my own jogl, though.  Now, when I try to use CVS to grab the code, I'm using this command line:

cvs -d :pserver:guest@cvs.dev.java.net:/cvs login

after giving the password "guest", I get the message:

Fatal error, aborting.
guest: no such user
cvs [login aborted]: authorization failed: server cvs.dev.java.net rejected access

I've tried this both with and without setting CVS_RSH to ssh.  I wonder if it hates dynamic IP addresses or something along those lines.

Thanks for the help, guys.  Unfortunately, I get the same problem with the last nightly build.  It could well be that there's a non-trivial problem with JOGL and 1.4.2.  Good thing I just updated my laptop, and not the desktop too!  I'll post if I figure anything out.

Actually, no.  Can you point me to where it's located? Is there a build for OSX?

Hello,
  Has anyone got a version of JOGL that runs on the new 1.4.2 jvm that was released today for OSX?  I'm getting a runtime classloader exception, and I have a hunch that libjogl.jnilib is tagged to work with 1.4.1 only.  Probably it needs to be tagged as 1.4.* or something similar.  Anyway, my first guess is that you need to recompile the library to fix this, but I notice that guest cvs access is broken (and the docs are contradictory).  Apparently I have to register at java.net to get an account that's different from the one I'm using to post this message?  
  Ugh.  I may not have time to jump through all these hoops at the moment, so if someone has a build that works, I'd be very grateful if they could let me know.

Yes, there is an example.  If you go and get one of the NeHe demos for jogl, and open up the jar, you'll see there is a package called common. In common, there's an FPSAnimator class that extends Animator. Both the source and the .class files are in the jar, and it's easy to pull the FPSAnimator code into your own project. At least, this was the case for the OS X versions, but I imagine it's the same on all platforms.

Hello,
  I'm working on a visualization project that needs to do successive renders into an accumulation buffer, and I'm trying to figure out how to do this in JOGL. It looks like the necessary GLUT functionality is not present in JOGL. Is there another way to do this? Perhaps something to do with pBuffers? I'd be very grateful if someone could point me in the right direction, perhaps even with a simple example.