Free Software

[y0ta]

Sorry for the second post about the matter but I didn't get an answer in my last.
Is it possible to make jogl work with kaffe or another free (as in freedom) jre?
I'd like to use jogl in a complete free software environment. IBM jdk is not free software, so I'm not interested in it.

I understand that jogl itslef has a bsd-ish license, so it shouldn't have problems by itself. But: does it use part of the library non implemeted by kaffe? Is kaffe-support in the TODO list?

Thank you for your time,
Flavio

[William]

The problem with support for free JVMs seems to be that their class libraries don't tend to be very complete (for instance, I saw that the NIO packages are still on Kaffe's TODO list). I think JOGL is meant to work on just about any JDK1.4 API, so you should really ask the Kaffe folks when they plan to support that VM version, if you can't get JOGL to work right now.

It may be easier to get LWJGL to work on Kaffe though, that binding had minimal dependency on standard AWT as one of its design goals.

[cfmdobbie]

LWJGL still needs NIO I'm afraid.

Yeah, LWJGL and JoGL will work fine on any JVM that provides what they need!  If Kaffe doesn't support NIO then you can't use that, I'm afraid.

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[AndersDahlberg]

I tried using lwjgl with gcj (from cvs) a couple of months ago (end april/beginning of may or something like that) - it almost worked(tm)
Stubs and most of the implementation of java.nio was there in the src - from what I could tell at a casual glance.

Some strange compile errors - guess that gcj "3.4" was quite unstable atm.

So, if I were you I'd have a chat with the gcj developers and see how good their implementation of java.nio is now (it should be better than when I tried... .

The only other thing I can think of (right now) that lwjgl uses which gcj might not support is the javax.imageio package (for loading texture images in examples and demos - I guess it's just optional though).

[pepijnve]

iirc kaffe does not have jawt support in its jni implementation. This is required to render to an awt component from native code. gl4java worked around this for jdk 1.2 and lower using closed apis (com.sun.... classes). As for as I know jogl only supports the clean jawt way.

[tortoise]

Ah, here's what I've been looking for! I've been interested in Kaffe myself, but never found good compatibility info. This is good stuff...

http://rainbow.netreach.net/~sballard/japi/htmlout/h-jdk14-kaffe.html

This seems to suggest nio support is pretty good actually.