OpenGLEAN Project

0.6 development

OpenGLEAN Shapes - Gleaning the cube.

OpenGLEAN Shapes Demo: The Utah Teapot

Introduction

OpenGLEAN is an open source project to enhance the GLUT API. gleanshapes is an open source project to isolate the shape-drawing routines from the core OpenGLEAN library. OpenGLEAN uses a codebase inherited from:

• freeglut
• OpenGLUT

Motivation

GLUT was something of a grab-bag of loosely- or un-related features. At its core, for many users, GLUT was a portable windowing library with a shallow learning curve and fairly useful capabilities.

OpenGLEAN seeks to enhance the API by rationalizing and extending it. The ability to draw spheres really does not seem to fit in with the core windowing capability, however. The jumbled collection of features means that client applications may bring in lots of unrelated code; and, more significantly, as OpenGLEAN evolves new functionality and fixes bugs, users may be forced to upgrade client software. By dividing the library along fairly coherent boundaries, many client applications may avoid using unnecessary partss of OpenGLEAN, and hence may avoid excessive version skewage.

Derived the GLUT family

GLUT defined many (though not all) of the shapes provided by this library (no actual code should have come from GLUT). freeglut provided some more shapes, and some of the basic code. OpenGLUT provided most of the rest of the code and numerous bug-fixes. OpenGLEAN continued where OpenGLEAN left off, adding another shape or two. So, OpenGLEAN appears to be the most featureful and bug-free version of these shapes. But reduced support can be had from OpenGLUT and freeglut.

Features

• Numerous bug-fixes relative to the freeglut versions to which this code can be traced.
• Better hiding of "global" data, compared to the old freeglut code.
• New shapes.
• Just the OpenGLEAN shapes; no joysticks, etc.
• Man-pages for UNIX-like installation.
• HTML and high-quality printable documentation for other users.
• By isolating the shapes, OpenGLEAN can help reduce library interdependence for developers and end-users.
• Compiled with tighter warnings to avoid bugs.
• Better CygWIN support than the parent codebases.

Plans:

• Source cleanups (beneficial to people who may work on the code).
• More shapes.
• More unified interface to the shape-drawing.
• More control over how the surfaces are drawn (e.g., faceted or smooth).
• Perhaps de-linting, and use of other tools to eliminate potential, subtle bugs.

In addition, the OpenGLEAN API proposals are still on the table: OpenGLEAN Shapes API Proposals.

Using gleanshapes

Documentation

Examples and detailed API and documentation are available from the SourceForge project interface for OpenGLEAN.

Download

As the shapes library is not central to the OpenGLEAN project, the code is expected to rapidly reach a 1.0-stable status, along with some other satellite libraries for OpenGLEAN.

Currently, development releases are made from time to time. See the OpenGLEAN file download section, e.g., at the OpenGLEAN SourceForge interface.

Developers

The current development version of gleanshapes is a compatible subset of OpenGLEAN. It may add features from there, and (afer OpenGLEAN 1.0) may conceivably break from backward compatibility.

CVS

gleanshapes is maintained in the OpenGLEAN CVS repository on SourceForge.

Supported in part by SourceForge.net.

Generated on Fri Sep 9 18:03:37 2005 for OpenGLEAN'sgleanshapes by doxygen 1.4.3
The OpenGLEAN project is hosted by SourceForge.