how about JavaFX section in Game APIs & Engines

[gouessej]

Good ol' gouessej spreading FUD again. Just because nothing ever works on your setup doesn't mean the whole world is broken.

Funny that I was just reading this: Multi-Optics: HTML5 3D Modeling app

[size=15pt]FUD??[/size] I spoke about this problem to Kenneth Bradley Russell in person during a dinner at Los Angeles when I went to Siggraph 2012, Sven and Xerxes can confirm. He argued that he can't test on all machines and that WebGL has to do a lot more things than an applet, he spoke about compositing, he said that the web browser is in your way, that it is not simple to optimize, we spoke about typed arrays, ... Moreover, I tested on several machines with updated drivers, not only on a single setup. Therefore, I advise you to learn to read (I have never written that I had tested exclusively on a single setup) and to get more reliable information before accusing me of spreading FUD. I tested with at least 4 different graphics cards (Nvidia Quadro FX 5000, Nvidia Geforce 7600 GT, ATI Radeon 9250 Pro, ATI Radeon X1950 Pro). Even someone here under Windows confirmed having some jittery with RunField which is not a very complicated AAA game. The creator of Runestone Defense who use HTML5 wrote that:

I agree that the processor / GPU needed to play an HTML5 game at decent performance is stupid insane

Actually, he is more aware of HTML5 lack of speed than you. I spent several days to write my article and the situation is worse now, Chromium refuses to run any WebGL application since I use an ATI Radeon X1950 Pro (most of drivers for ATI graphics cards under Linux are blacklisted by Google).

Edit.: You really disappoint me, I spent so much time in writing my article about WebGL, I thought that you would read it carefully instead of accusing me of fud.

Edit.2: I saw Teamup at Siggraph.

Edit.3: My problem with LWJGL came from the frequency. If you use another display mode with the same frequency than the previous one, I don't get any straight line in my task bar, otherwise my desktop and this bar become very dirty. This "bug" is reproducible with any native windowing toolkit (including NEWT).

[Spasi]

FUD = generalizations like "omg 2 fps to display a teapot, WebGL sucks". You don't need to lecture me about Javascript's shortcomings, I know more about it than you think.

ps. It's noone's fault you test with shitty blacklisted drivers. I'm on AMD/Firefox too and I can run different WebGL samples in a dozen tabs without any problems.
ps2. What makes you think I read any of your articles?

[Spasi]

On topic, JavaFX 2.2 has been released (JDK7u6 as well), with support for Linux, H.264 video and touch events/gestures.

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[princec]

I understand the sentiment of what you're trying to say there Julien but it's a brand new technology that's going to take a bit of time to work out. Absolutely you're right in that it's not mainstream end user tech yet (with IE not supporting it, it simply can't be, let alone all the broken drivers out there). However what it's aiming to do is pretty laudable and a worthy cause. Who knows, maybe Javascript will get 5x faster over the next decade like Java did, in which case it's all down to crappy drivers, and if there ever was incentive for driver writers to get their stuff working properly for once, it'd be ubiquitous desktop deployment of webGL.

Still hate Javascript mind and wish it would go away. Biggest single mistake the Web has made evar.

Cas

[princec]

Hmm licensed H264 video playback. Finally. That seals the deal!

Spasi - perhaps JavaFX is the solution to LWJGL/OSX/Java7 display woes?

Cas

[princec]

Hmm also there's JDK7 on ARM to download, as well as OSX!

Cas

[ra4king]

JavaFX's renderer is not as fast as pure OpenGL, but its new faster and lighter applet plugin could most likely provide potential for a way to 'hook' an OpenGL context onto a 'canvas' like LWJGL did with AWT?

[davedes]

So generally you'd agree a Swing GUI (or any other non-native GUI) isn't a problem too in itself.
JFileChooser is a bit of a corner-case in my opinion. Yes, JFileChooser sort of sucks, but you hardly ever see one. And if you consider we'll be saving our stuff more and more often on the web anyway, this will become even less of an issue.

File choosers appear in almost every software -- it's the standard means of loading and saving data. The fact that such a fundamental component is crappy is a big issue.

FileDialog (not Swing, which is what we're discussing) is indeed more OS compliant, though hardly any Java apps choose to use it over JFileChooser. Hell, even NetBeans seems to use the ugly JFileChooser.

There are some other minor quirks -- like not being able to search menu bar items on Mac (you need a bit of set up to get it working -- most developers won't ever bother), and the general feeling of the GUI being "off" (Mac software design is generally extremely consistent from one app to the next).

Yes, Java/Swing applications start up slower. But QT nor Python is going to solve that if these applications are java for good reasons (like NetBeans, Eclipse or JVisualVM).
And besides, on my new laptop that has a nice and fast SSD, java startup-time isn't really an issue anymore. These performance increases you talk about work for java too, you know

There are plenty of IDEs not created in Swing (or Java for that matter). Eclipse uses SWT which is a great and very natural Java GUI, IMO.

VisualVM isn't exactly your average type of software -- although that, too, may have been better off not using Swing. The GUI is sluggish and unresponsive on my Mac. Granted, it's got a lot going on, but you wonder whether a more optimal GUI toolkit would help its situation...

Regarding H264 playback with JavaFX... Damn, that's nice.

[sproingie]

My favorite part about WebGL is how it's going to expose whatever driver bugs are out there to arbitrary code off the internet.  And in kernel mode at that.  You really think they write 3d graphics drivers with security in mind?

[ReBirth]

If javaFX really support h264 WELL then it worth to learn.

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[princec]

My favorite part about WebGL is how it's going to expose whatever driver bugs are out there to arbitrary code off the internet.  And in kernel mode at that.  You really think they write 3d graphics drivers with security in mind?

That's why MS won't support it. That said... OpenGL drivers are supposed to execute in user mode, unlike DX drivers.

Cas

[gouessej]

FUD = generalizations like "omg 2 fps to display a teapot, WebGL sucks". You don't need to lecture me about Javascript's shortcomings, I know more about it than you think.

ps. It's noone's fault you test with shitty blacklisted drivers. I'm on AMD/Firefox too and I can run different WebGL samples in a dozen tabs without any problems.
ps2. What makes you think I read any of your articles?

At first, you make some conclusions about me without reading my article that I used as a reference to provide more elaborate explanations than "omg 2 fps to display a teapot, WebGL sucks". Therefore, you're simply wrong, "FUD" is not the appropriate term in this case. Secondly, official free open source and proprietary drivers of these graphics cards are not "shitty", especially for the Nvidia Quadro FX 5000 and all Java bindings for OpenGL don't blacklist tons of drivers unlike Google and Mozilla do, I still think it is abusive. If we blacklisted graphics cards as reliable as the Nvidia Quadro FX 5000 in JOGL, then it would be logical to blacklist all graphics cards of the world.

I have never said that you don't know Javascript. However, you seem not to understand that we pay to have Dell machines with certified OpenGL drivers (for Windows AND Redhat Linux), it is why I even question criteria leading to blacklist drivers.

[princec]

Julien - the drivers aren't blacklisted randomly: they are blacklisted because they have bugs in them that cause the browser either to crash, perform very slowly, or have security flaws. Reliable as you think the drivers may be, Google have rather more resource than you to prove it one way or the other.

Cas

[gouessej]

Julien - the drivers aren't blacklisted randomly: they are blacklisted because they have bugs in them that cause the browser either to crash, perform very slowly, or have security flaws. Reliable as you think the drivers may be, Google have rather more resource than you to prove it one way or the other.

I don't say that the drivers are blacklisted randomly, I said that the criteria are questionable and Kenneth Bradley Russell (a major engineer working on WebGL for Google) said that he can't test on all graphics cards. Google can be wrong, its size does not mean that it can always be right and prove it. I wrote a bug report about this problem, we will probably get some information soon. Nvidia Quadro FX 5000 is used by default on Dell high end professional computers, we are not speaking about a crappy low end Intel chipset.

[princec]

I think they're playing it safe rightly because of the security implications. It might actually be a whitelist and a blacklist they use. I could ask Ken a bit more about it.

Cas

[Cero]

On a related note, Carmack expressed his fears of WebGL at QuakeCon 2012

I hear designing GUI apps with C# is much more easy and fun - might be because there are these helper to draw and move buttons and stuff, to do it visually rather than code, like visual basic and stuff
which I would like

however I'm sure that these things exist for java too, but I only know of some netbeans plugin thing - however since I'm not a gui developer per se, I may just be uninformed.

[Danny02]

After developing some C# GUI applications for a while now(1year ) I have to say it is in some way a little bit neater then Java swing.
After taking a look at JavaFX 2, I think JavaFX is more cleaner and better(because of Java^^, C'/.Net is really bad) then WPF for C#, but it does not have the syntax sugar C# has with its Delegates and Propertys.
Also the IDE support is not so good for JavaFX compared to WPF(when using the XML definitions) atm.

I think  with Java 8 lambdas Java will have all the sytanx sugar it needs to be a better platform for Desktop GUIs then WPF. (using lambda functíons for ActionListeners)

[gouessej]

I think they're playing it safe rightly because of the security implications. It might actually be a whitelist and a blacklist they use. I could ask Ken a bit more about it.

Cas

Kenneth has just replied that he uses FBOs in WebGL and my graphics cards are too old (even the Nvidia Quadro 5000 released 2 years ago).

[princec]

You sure the Quadro 5000 doesn't have FBOs? The Q5000 has OpenGL 4.2 drivers and I think FBOs have been around since OpenGL 3.0.

Cas

[Spasi]

After developing some C# GUI applications for a while now(1year ) I have to say it is in some way a little bit neater then Java swing.
After taking a look at JavaFX 2, I think JavaFX is more cleaner and better(because of Java^^, C'/.Net is really bad) then WPF for C#, but it does not have the syntax sugar C# has with its Delegates and Propertys.
Also the IDE support is not so good for JavaFX compared to WPF(when using the XML definitions) atm.

I think  with Java 8 lambdas Java will have all the sytanx sugar it needs to be a better platform for Desktop GUIs then WPF. (using lambda functíons for ActionListeners)

Keep in mind that post-JDK7 Java developers have access to dozens of scripting languages and also type-safe languages that let you write custom DSLs (ScalaFX for example).

IDE support is not critical for JavaFX atm, the JavaFX Scene Builder is very well-made and lets you export to FXML. Also, ScenicView is amazing, makes GUI debugging so much easier. A must-have for anyone trying to learn JavaFX.