[one last comment on this thread. Only just got some of this now. My
mail client has been selectively not downloading emails on me for some
odd reason (well, I've been stuffing with sendmail over the last day or
so....)]
Doug Twilleager wrote:
>
> that I made out of context and making a lot of assumtions about how we do
> software engineering in Java 3D. Unless you are on the Java 3D team, you
> cannot make the statements that you have made - about software engineering
> or the complexity of the system.
As I said in a private email, this is not the result of a single
conversation. In that email I detailed a number of occassions over the
past two and a bit years where there has been a consistent pattern -
both of explicit j3d references and of a more general pattern. Sure I
don't know nitty gritty details, but there is a definite, undeniable
pattern in all these comments over a very long period of time, by quite
a number of people - all of them senior in the team - and I've yet to
see one piece of evidence to the contrary.
Now, I'm not taking a shot at you or anyone else just for the hell of
it. I really like J3d as a concept. It has promise, but is far from
ideal at the moment. I'd like to see it succeed too. Hell, I don't spend
between 2 and 6 hours every day of the week maintaining j3d.org and the
FAQ because I want to see it fail! (and before you fire off some other
comment - no I don't like seeing my name up in lights either. I do it
because I enjoy it and I like to help others) I really would like to
have much less to do because things are better documented. I have very
high standards basically because I am so used to teaching newbies and
know where they need help.
I am not one to sit back and blindly heap praise on something that needs
fixing. Comment on it I will. (Basically a good assumption is that if I
don't comment on it, then I feel it's being done right). Group hugs are
not something that is going to get things to a better spot. Great, one
or two people/groups are able to do something big and useful with the
product - wouldn't it be better if it was hundreds or thousands? A few
simple steps now, one's that have been asked for for the past couple of
years, would enable this to happen. Cutting off the newbies for the sake
of pushing new features for the few is not going to make it a popular
system. [1] My position is their position at the moment. I don't have
the luxury of a fulltime job only coding j3d, nor do I have the luxury
of the fullsail guys where they can talk face to face with their
students drawing on whiteboards and paper to explain things. Trying to
describe how something works over twenty lines of an email is a bloody
difficult thing to do. I'm trying to make everyone's life easier here!
Here's an open offer - if anyone from the Sun team would like to be on
the j3d.org aliases or have CVS write access to the site, just let me
know. I'll gladly give it to you. Just don't expect to sit back and
watch the messages go by. [2]
[1] Personal opinion is that we should not be trying to be on the tails
of OpenGL and DirectX, but one step behind them to let them sort out the
problems and we pick the good bits that really do work.
[2] For a while now I've been considering an open offer to the list for
people to help contribute, but really would prefer to only keep
knowledgable/experienced/respected people working on the site in order
to keep the quality high. Still debating that with myself currently.
Mail me privately if you have any suggestions.
--
Justin Couch Author, Java Hacker
http://www.vlc.com.au/~justin/ Java 3D FAQ Maintainer
http://www.j3d.org/ J3D.org The Java 3D Community Site
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"Humanism is dead. Animals think, feel; so do machines now.
Neither man nor woman is the measure of all things. Every organism
processes data according to its domain, its environment; you, with
all your brains, would be useless in a mouse's universe..."
- Greg Bear, Slant
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