Raspberry Pi + Java 8 + JOGL => Processing Roadmap Question

guy.winte..

Raspberry Pi + Java 8 + JOGL => Processing Roadmap Question

in Integration and Hardware • 9 months ago

I'm having a shot at running Processing 2.07 with Java 8 EA (Just the JIT) on a Raspberry Pi . Basic sketchs that don't require OPENGL work fine. Anything using P2D P3D use OPENGL and crash.

I had this exchange on the Pi forums:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=81&t=27793&e=0

A solution:

Change the Processing source-code to use NEWT instead of AWT for P2D and P3D sketches. This would improve portability of Processing. It would completely remove the need to have a JRE with AWT and also remove the need for a separate Processing Android back-end because JOGL NEWT already work on mobile systems like Android, MeeGo and desktop GNU/Linux MacOS and Windows. ~ Xerxes Rånby

Looks like the last step of running optimized java on the Pi is moving away from AWT to NEWT. Given the direction towards OpenGL, are there and plans to adopt NEWT thereby improving the platform independence of Processing and maybe in this case its performance?

Replies(3)

andres

Re: Raspberry Pi + Java 8 + JOGL => Processing Roadmap Question

7 months ago

The latest revisions of Processing on github already set NEWT as the default toolkit to use when the platform is not Windows, OSX or Linux, so this should cover the Raspberry Pi. I haven't had the time to test it though. However, 2.0b8 should incorporate these changes, so you can try them out when it is out. You could also try building Processing from source.

guy.winte..

Re: Re: Raspberry Pi + Java 8 + JOGL => Processing Roadmap Question

7 months ago

That's great news but Raspberry Pi is for the most part Linux distributions so it would probably default to not using NEWT. As you suggest I could force NEWT by compiling it myself.

Does sticking with AWT avoid having to test NEWT for compatibility across all the other platforms (if it ain't broke don't fix it) or is it missing features that make it a poor replacement for AWT right now?

andres

Re: Raspberry Pi + Java 8 + JOGL => Processing Roadmap Question

7 months ago

To be precise, AWT is always used, regardless of the platform, because Processing's PApplet is basically an AWT Applet component. What happens when you choose NEWT as the toolkit, is that JOGL renders into a NEWT window, which is in turn attached to the AWT canvas: http://jogamp.org/jogl/doc/NEWT-Overview.html. Using a NEWT window solves some issues related to the transition to Java 7, most notably on OS X.

I do have a raspberry pi sitting on my desk, but unfortunately I haven't had the time to try Processing on it. The JOGL native jars for ARM are already included by default with the core libraries, so you should be able to get started without much trouble. I'd recommend you try setting PGL.toolkit to either AWT and NEWT to see which one works best... Any help we can get for testing and debugging on the Raspberry pi will be greatly appreciated!

One final note, from the information I originally collected from the web, it is also highly recommended to use Oracle's JDK instead of the OpenJDK, since the performance appears to be quite bad with the latter: http://www.savagehomeautomation.com/projects/raspberry-pi-installing-oracle-java-runtime-environment-jre.html . This is a few months old though, maybe the situation improved with the OpenJDK since then.

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