This raises an interesting question for me. I appreciate that the Java
community is very big but does it consist largely of freeloaders who don't
spend money?

So, is there a viable market for writing high-quality commercial tools and
libraries for Java programmers? If so, what is the easiest way to reach the
target market with advertising?

That's fine, we only use nVidia cards anyway. But I'm having a hell of a job
getting JOGL to work. I tried getting the latest builds of JOGL and the
JOGL demos but I got:

$ cd jogl-demos
$ java -cp build/jogl-demos.jar demos.gears.Gears
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError:
javax/media/opengl/GLEventListener
       at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
       at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:620)
       at
java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:124)
       at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(URLClassLoader.java:260)
       at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$000(URLClassLoader.java:56)
       at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:195)
       at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
       at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:188)
       at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:306)
       at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:276)
       at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:251)
       at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClassInternal(ClassLoader.java:319)

So I tried getting a coherent distribution from the latest stable releases
(jogl-1.1.1-rc3) but I still get the same error. I've tried recompiling the
whole thing from scratch and still get the same error.

Finally, I've scoured the internet to see if anyone else has working
implementations. I found a couple of demos that run under web start. One of
my browsers under (64-bit Debian) Linux handles this and the demo runs but
it is very slow. However, it is layering both Java2D and OpenGL so maybe it
is inherently slow. The same demo on my Windows XP box (same hardware) runs
for a few seconds before hanging.

Outside Java, OpenGL works flawlessly on both machines and we use it
regularly in our work (from OCaml). Both machines have the same spec:

2x 4400+ Athlon64
2Gb RAM
GeForce 7900GT 512Mb

This raises several questions for me that I've had trouble getting answers
to:

1. If I want to do high-performance real-time interactive 2D and 3D graphics
and port our OpenGL-based libraries to the Java platform for others to use,
is JOGL the right library for me?

2. How many people actually have a working JOGL development environment, so
they can compile OpenGL applications written in Java?

3. How reliable is JOGL? Is it viable to use JOGL for commercial work or is
it too unstable in practice?

I have found some alternatives like the NetBeans OpenGL project but it has
zero users. I believe JOGL is supported by Sun so I assume it is the
defacto-standard for this kind of work but I'd like some reassurance...

Many thanks,