Hans Muller's Blog

Parading Out of the Open Source Door

June has been a record breaker for new open source projects at Sun. The projects ambling out the door this month have run the gamut from new initiatives like JDIC, JDNC, to longtime J2SE stalwart Java3D. And standing in the doorway is the great hulking giant Solaris, of which our president Jonathan Schwartz has said: "Make no mistake: we will open source Solaris". At today's opening JavaOne keynote Jonathan also let it be known that Project Looking Glass was similarly poised to pass through the open source doorway, just as soon as some final (unspecified) details were ironed out.

So now perhaps you're wondering what all of this implies about Java itself passing through the same door. Of that I can tell you with absolute certainty: I have absolutely no idea. My goal is just to remind those of you who of depend exclusively on blogs for news, a little about the significance of the Looking Glass and Java 3D projects.

One way to explain Project Looking Glass is to take stock of the obvious. For some time now nearly all new PCs have included general purpose CPUs that can execute billions of instructions per second. Right next to the fire breathing CPU there's usually a separate graphics processor that can render 3D scenes of enormous complexity at frame rates well in excess of what you'll find at the local cinema. With all this power at our disposal, why are we viewing a desktop GUI that requires little more than an efficient implementation of an early 1980s BITBLT graphics library? Of the many possible answers to this question, the one that Looking Glass is intended to explore is this: we still don't know how to take all of that potential and turn it into a desktop that makes using a computer easier. It's time to start experimenting with the possibilities and Project Looking Glass is a software laboratory for doing just that.

Project Looking Glass is based on an extension to the X11 server that combines the contents of top level windows from conventional X11 clients and new Java 3D client application scene graphs into a unified scene graph that's composited and displayed on the screen. There's a new X11 window manager that demonstrates how one interact with a desktop metaphor that's more than just a stack of sheets of (opaque) paper. There are also some demo applications that give you an inkling of what it's like to deploy an application whose visual elements occupy 3-space. To begin your own exploration, watch for the project's open source announcement on javadesktop.org.

The other big open source announcement that I wanted to mention was Java 3D. Java 3D has seen much use in serious endeavors like engineering and medical science, and it's been used in loads of games and virtual reality applications. However the big question many developers gravitate towards, as they while away the moments waiting for their tiny espressos to brew, is this: would it be possible to use Java 3D to build a first-person-shooter view of the operating system and would we be allowed to remove files or kill processes by blasting at them with impossibly large weapons? Not surprisingly, the answer to that question is yes. As to the natural follow up question: will the processes and files fight back? We're still looking into that. One example of such an application, which I haven't tried, is the "Brutal File Manager". If you're aware of others, I'd like to hear about them.

You'll find the new Java 3D API open source project here: java3d.dev.java.net. It's a big software stack. The developers describe it like this:

The Java 3D API provides a set of object-oriented interfaces
that support a simple, high-level programming model you can
use to build, render, and control the behavior of 3D objects
and visual environments. With the Java 3D API, you can
incorporate high-quality, scalable, platform-independent 3D
graphics into applications and applets based on Java
technology.

Java 3D is an integral part of the Looking Glass Project. If you're planning to explore desktop 3D in depth (IOK, not all that clever, but hey - this is a blog) check it out now.

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