OpenGL has changed over the years (new versions, obsolescence of old versions), and the J's interface to OpenGL has changed over the years.
It's still possible to find and use a variety of older versions. And, because documentation takes quite some effort to put together, it can be advantageous, when learning (and perhaps sometimes for other purposes) to use "obsolete" versions (which have solid documentation). Some things change radically across versions, but some fundamental concepts remain the same. (Writing documentation for the newer versions has proved a bit frustrating because of aggressive retirement of older interfaces. Personally, I think that much of that is uncalled for, except perhaps in resource constrained environments, like low end phones. It has always been the case that history has a lot to teach us, and that principle still holds in the context of computers and OpenGL. Simplification is great, but good documentation takes precedence. And, that is an issue with J903.) But, also, OpenGL covers a lot of ground, and for most people has many unexplored corners. So I expect that there will always be some tension around complexity vs. simplicity. That said... RIght now, the only J903 documentation I can find on OpenGL is at Help > Studio > Qt Demos... >> Shader But that demo does not work on my OSX (Mojave) machine (which has OpenGL 1.2). For whatever reasons (possibly including availability of good documentation), Apple has been slow to adopt newer versions of OpenGL This has support for shaders, but it's a preliminary version of that support, which has a different interface from more recent versions. But if it works on your listener's machine, I would recommend that they take a look at that demo (which includes source code) as a starting point. Also, when porting code from J604, I would look at some of the opengl support implemented in J903 for similarly named constructs -- ~addons/api/gles/gles.ijs and maybe ~addons/ide/qt/opengl.ijs (though ~addons/ide/qt/gl2.ijs might also have some hints). And, since we're always looking for good examples, I imagine that we would be happy to help your listener work through any obstacles they feel up to describing to us (and would also be interested in their work, if they feel like sharing that with us). I hope this helps, -- Raul On Sun, Jan 23, 2022 at 6:13 PM 'robert therriault' via Programming <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hello everyone, > > I had an email from a listener to the podcast who was wondering if the new > versions of J are useful for exploring OpenGL. > > It sounds like they had done experimenting with J604 and were wondering if > there was a path forward with J903. > > Any information that you can provide about the way that OpenGL would work in > J903 or its relationship with gl2 in J903's Jqt IDE would be appreciated. > > Cheers, bob > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
