Re: [ice-dev] JavaFX 3d geometry editing

[Jay Jay Billings <jayjaybillings@xxxxxxxxx>]

Tom,

Thanks for the email. I'm happy to tell you more about what we are doing.

I have CC'ed the ICE developer list so that Robert Smith and some of my other devs can comment on JavaFX on Linux. Here's a screenshot of the 3d geometry editor that Tony wrote running on a Fedora 22, GTK 3.16, KDE 5 machine at ORNL. We haven't had any trouble with it, although Greg Watson (Eclipse PTP) also suggested that we would. Robert and Tony can tell you how they made it work on Linux since those two are veritable JavaFX 3d ninjas.

This work started as an effort to replace some of the 3d visualization tools in Eclipse ICE that are used for constructive solid geometry, mesh editing and visualizations of nuclear plants. The current tooling is based on JMonkeyEngine3 (JME3), which the IP team has declined to approve because of problems with lwjgl and other dependencies. So, for the past six months or so we have been working to refactor ICE so that it will pull visualization services from a factory. It now separates the 3d graphics implementation from the rest of the UI so that we just pass in the data and a composite where it should draw. This will allow us to ship with the JavaFX service by default and to provide alternative service implementations via the marketplace, including the old JME3 implementation and another one that Tony wants to write based on what they use at L33tLabs.

(This new visualization service infrastructure will be the initial contribution for the Eclipse Advanced Visualization Project too.)

Tony and I looked at several alternatives and JavaFX was the only thing that we definitely knew would meet the IP requirements because it is already in the JDK.

I'm very interested to hear how you think we can collaborate.

Best,

Jay

On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 9:41 AM, Tom Schindl <tom.schindl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi,

I've been reading your CQ on the 3d stuff with JavaFX Tony has been
written for you. Would you guys mind elaborating a bit on that?

This sounds cool JavaFX technology and as I'm leading all the JavaFX
efforts at Eclipse it might makes sense to somehow collaborate.

One warning notice a head:

JavaFX can not embedded in SWT on Linux when you run on GTK3 because the
glass layer at JavaFX is written against the Gtk2 API. IMHO it would not
be a major undertaking to implement ~10 Glass classes for Gtk3 but as it
looks like Oracle is not planing that for Java9 unless somebody steps up
doing so.

The other option for RCP is naturally got get rid of SWT all together ;-)

Tom

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Thomas Schindl, CTO
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Jay Jay Billings

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Twitter Handle: @jayjaybillings

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