News:

July 14th, 2004

Added online documentation


June 25th, 2004

Hi!

Just a few minutes ago I released ODE for Java v0.2 


Features:
---------

ODE for Java is now splitted up in
- a core package that represents the pure JNI binding to ODE.
- an extension package that contains additional features that 
  need source changes or additions in the original ODE 
  distribution.
- a java3d package that provides a scenegraph representation
  of several ODE objects and comes with behaviors for setting up 
  the simulation loop.

The JNI of ODEforJava v0.2 is designed to run with ODE v0.039 and
should cover most of the ODE functionality that is available in 
that distribution (no OPCODE).

The source packages are delivered as Eclipse projects with (to be 
slightly adjusted) ant scripts that generate JNI header files and 
create the final library on linux systems.

An MSVC project is included to build the library on Windows systems.


Remarks:
--------

I know there is another JNI wrapper for ODE on dev.java.net called 
odejava. As far as I found out it uses SWIG to generate the JNI 
binding automatically which is a promising approach regarding the 
production of less error-prone software and being always close to 
the development of ODE.
Nevertheless I wonder if this automated wrapper generation also 
accounts for all ODE-specific inner object dependencies in 
conjunction with java garbage collection.
If anybody makes or has made experiences in comparing these two 
projects especially with regard to this issue I would be glad to 
hear about and learn from that. I want to emphasise that I do *not* 
mention this to make another project bad. Far from it! Please test 
both. ;-)


History:
--------

After the first version v0.1 had been released by me in Nov. 2002 
Max Gilead established the sourceforge project and put the sources 
of v0.1 into it. 

In Jan. 2003 he released the core part as v0.11 with helpful changes 
regarding java3d dependencies and gcc issues. A complete rewrite was 
under consideration but has not been done.

In Mar. 2003 I included some of Max's changes into my own trunk and 
started development to adapt ODEforJava to ODE's new collision 
detection architecture. The development continued but without any 
updates to the sourceforge site.

In conjunction with another project that deals with simulated physics 
and augmentated reality (check out http://sourceforge.net/projects/jartoolkit) 
I restructured and revised the sources and made my ant script (hopefully) 
useful for other people, too. Today I released it as v0.2.



kind regards 

	Tim Schmidt