How about making jReality awesome?

Core SceneGraph API, Utilities, Factories etc.
Post Reply
petsagouris
Posts: 8
Joined: Sun 26. Aug 2012, 14:15

How about making jReality awesome?

Post by petsagouris » Mon 27. Aug 2012, 20:32

I see that there is a mulitude of things going on in the library.
Would a cleanup and an update(!) of the components be a logical thing to do before continuing development?

Proposals:
  • All the src-* directories should be merged and actual packages would take care of themselves in the IDE.
  • Similarly all the test-* directories should be the same.
  • Set up Maven for the project so that dependencies can be handled easier.
  • Convert the repository to git, easier branching and isolation of development aspects is enough to justify this.
  • Update the jar libraries to their latest versions.
  • Update the jogl package to use JOGL2 (it is at rc10 now so the API should remain stable up to the proper release).

User avatar
gunn
Posts: 323
Joined: Thu 14. Dec 2006, 09:56
Location: TU Berlin
Contact:

Re: How about making jReality awesome?

Post by gunn » Tue 28. Aug 2012, 09:51

Petsagouris,

Thanks for the feedback!

The development group for jReality, mostly centered at the TU Berlin, is engaged right now in a process which includes several of the points you raise. Work is under way to implement a new backend with the latest state of JOGL. We have also planned to switch over to git in the near future; and a code-cleanup party is also planned for the fall when everyone is back from vacation (the semester here starts in middle October).

I'd be interested to hear more why you recommend merging the src-* (and test-*) folders. Also, for those not familiar with Maven (like myself), it would be helpful to hear a bit more about the advantages of how it handles dependencies. (Re. Maven: by "dependencies" do you mean dependencies in the build process?)

And if you care to point out which 3rd party jars are out-of-date and where the latest versions can be downloaded, that would make the update process easier (in case there are not other reasons to stay with the older versions). Or is there a better way to manage this update process?
jReality core developer

petsagouris
Posts: 8
Joined: Sun 26. Aug 2012, 14:15

Re: How about making jReality awesome?

Post by petsagouris » Tue 28. Aug 2012, 12:54

Good to hear about the git migration being planned. I urge you to do this first before even trying anything else on jReality. Having the developers working on isolated branches for specific features or bugfixes is the best thing that could happen to a project.

The directory structure changes are related to the Maven setup. Maven is basically a common way to manage the project and automatizing them while adding capabilities that previously required quite a bit of work. Please refer to the Maven documentation to find out more.

Maven can handle all things relative to dependency management (downloading, updating, sub-dependencies) on every scope(compile, runtime,etc), please look at Introduction to the dependency mechanism

So, I took the time and scanned the libraries and this is the results:
  • antlr.jar
    - If I am not mistaken this is version 2.7.5 and currently ANTLR is at 3.4
  • gluegen-rt.jar & jogl.jar
    - These are going to be replaced by jogl 2.0 I believe.
  • itext-2.1.3.jar
    - i-Text is now at version 5.3.2
  • jacknativeclient.jar
    - Should be rebuild, from what I understand from the commit log on github there aren't many changes and possibly only cleanups which is always a good thing.
  • janino.jar
    - JANINO has been quite an active project, I suggest updating since the timestamp of the files in the .jar are saying 2007.
  • jinput.jar
    - May need updating , couldn't tell if this version is the latest.
  • netutil.jar
    - Should be updated (I believe this is version 0.36 and there is 0.39 up).
  • pd.jar
    - Should be updated, there was/is some code review as seen on the repository
  • xpp3.jar & xstream.jar
    - Should be updated, latest release is XStream 1.4.3
Furthermore, I'd like to request to enhance the modularity of jReality, personally if I wanted to incorporate the library in my program I couldn't care less about having the Viewer classes inside the library. Maybe even try to segment jreality by lets say having the audio functionality as a separate complementary jar (just ideas).

Andre
Posts: 226
Joined: Fri 18. Sep 2009, 11:30

Re: How about making jReality awesome?

Post by Andre » Wed 29. Aug 2012, 09:46

Hi petsagouris,

I'll first apply my new tutorialscript with the old third-party libs and afterwards I'll start updating the third party libs like you suggested.

thx 4 your effort

best
Andre

petsagouris
Posts: 8
Joined: Sun 26. Aug 2012, 14:15

Re: How about making jReality awesome?

Post by petsagouris » Wed 29. Aug 2012, 12:06

Nice one Andre, I hope you get the time to setup git after that ;)

It would be a great thing to see jReality on github or any other git repository that could accept pull requests so that the development can benefit from the people online wanting to help with it.

Andre
Posts: 226
Joined: Fri 18. Sep 2009, 11:30

Re: How about making jReality awesome?

Post by Andre » Wed 29. Aug 2012, 18:57

-antlr
-itextpdf
-janino
-netutil
-xstream
- jinput
- xpp3
- libpd
- jterm
done

TODO:
- jacknativejar

Post Reply