The state of LWJGL?

[elias4444]

Just wondering, as I haven't heard anything for a while, what's the state of the LWJGL project?

I'm still heavily invested using lwjgl for my games these days. I know there are competing(?) technologies like JOGL and JOAL out there. Is the LWJGL team still working closely with both of those? Any code sharing happening? How big is the LWJGL team these days? How many active developers? Do the jME guys help out at all? What can us "non-C-programmers" do to help? So many questions. 

Let me say, before any replies are posted, I REALLY appreciate those of you who've worked on LWJGL. I think it's a great API and has filled a much needed role in the Java community.

[kappa]

From what I've seen the project is live and kicking, they just released version 1.1.4 not too long ago.
The first alpha for LWJGL 2.0 has also been released.

Both FMOD and DEVIL have been killed and replaced by Java equivalents (Slick Utils).
Font support was just added to that library recently (so you can write text).

LWJGL Applets have made some really nice progress and now have a really nice Applet Loader (should be 100% usable with the new java plugin).

DirectX (10? and beyond) support is suppose to be in the works, not sure when we'll see it.

The Slick Project is making waves in the 2D Java Gaming scene, makes 2d games really easy and nice to make http://slick.cokeandcode.com/

JME is maturing nicely and rumor has it a nex-gen NCSoft Game will be using it (In Production).

Java Kernel is coming along nicely, due to LWJGL's awt free nature (mostly) we'll probably see some nice small java game bundles soon.

LWJGL IRC channel is always active and cool projects always turning up on it, and has great real time support for most LWJGL problems.

As for current development, my personal opinion is that LWJGL has achieve most (if not all) of the goal it originally set out to do (i.e. provide a light small binding to gaming stuff that needs native code).

Probably now just needs the odd fixing of any bugs that crop up (new OS's etc).
Not sure i need it to do much else?

[Matzon]

wow, that was basically what I would have said
I will add the following though:
LWJGL is basically "done", we are currently looking into some of the issues that we do have and as a result we released 2.0 which had some stuff removed and some internals changed.
We haven't had much feedback on this, but thats probably because I haven't made proper announcements of this.

With regards to active developers:
Currently the most active developer - and has been so for quite a bit of time - is elias. He has been working on most of the internal stuff. I usually do the more practical stuff like releasing and maintaining mail and website - along with donations (going a bit slowly with these  ). Especially since fmod and devil has been dropped, I've had a lot less code to maintain.
We have had random drops of code, which is much appreciated!
However we would love to have more developers add support for more platforms and fix some of the hairy issues we do have.
For non-c programmers there are still a lot of tasks, especially relating to documentation and tests.

When opengl3 arrives, I think we could use some help, since this will probably result in a lot of work.

[Matzon]

oh, and do consider joining us on IRC - a lot of lwjgl (and non-lwjgl!) talks occur there, instead of on the forum (for better or worse).

[elias4444]

Yeah, I guess I've always been a forums guy. I just downloaded and installed Colloquy for my Mac though, and I think I've got the right channel set up.

I appreciate the quick responses.

[kappa]

oh, and do consider joining us on IRC - a lot of lwjgl (and non-lwjgl!) talks occur there, instead of on the forum (for better or worse).

Yup do agree, the forums are very dry compared to the IRC Channel.