Can anyone help? I have tried searching for days and no closer to the answer!! What are the main difference between JOGL and Java3D? What are the benefits of both and disadvantages? Do they differ in their programming styles any way? thanks :D - its all logical

Well, give him/her/it the benefit of the doubt:

JOGL is the sucky new OpenGL binding layer for Java that Sun are "sponsoring" with their "goodwill". OpenGL programming is all about how to draw things (draw this triangle here with this blending operation etc) and though it starts out simple it gets hard fast as you try to do more and more nontrivial things such as rendering animated models.

Java3D is the sucky old 3D scenegraph library for Java that Sun abandoned a while ago and then unexpectedly are resurrecting. Java3D programming is all about what you want to draw, not how to draw it. Java3D starts out being amazingly difficult to learn and fraught with pitfalls and unexpected performance problems and bugs, but makes a lot of stuff reasonably easy, such as the aforementioned animated models.

They are about as different a way as you can get from each other to draw 3D stuff.

And now the shameless plug:

There are two great alternatives to both - instead of using turdy JOGL you could try out the LWJGL - which is specifically designed for professional games programmers in Java, and is an OpenGL binding; and if you are interested in scenegraph programming instead, you might consider Xith3D, which looks very like Java3D but is a) not dead b) open sourced c) optimised for games programmers d) not shit

Cas

Caveat: I am of course horribly biased.

Cas

Thats for the reply... the info was useful from Cas....

However what is this sticky award???

I am a lil confused about the other replys :S

- its all logical

Cas is definitely biased . Being the developer of LWJGL, he''s one of those who Sun shafted by releasing JOGL when LWJGL was already in development for a long time.

But I like LWJGL more than JOGL. It seems more mature.

Agreed. JOGL is designed simply for graphics. LWJGL is a game library. Comparing JOGL and LWJGL is like comparing DirectX and OpenGL -- you can''t, because DirectX is an entire library including things beyond graphics, whereas OpenGL is only graphics. Now comparing the graphics functionality of LWJGL and JOGL as a whole is a different story...

I think that the JOGL/Java 3D/LWJGL question will be making it''s way into the FAQ soon...

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