JSR-184

After a break of a few weeks, I went back to X3D coding, and as a result, I now have a working X3D parser, and I've implemented just enough of the X3D spec that one can look at boxes and set a viewpoint.

I started to become a little worried after I noticed that I was approaching 6-7k of code just to draw a little box, so I decided to port what I had to J2ME to make sure everything worked. Good thing I started early because if I had left the port until the last moment, I surely would have had a seizure or something.

Apparently, vertices and normals are defined using bytes and shorts in JSR-184 (the current Java specification for doing 3-D graphics for cellphones). Yes, I am aware that cellphones do not have floating point units, making floating point math very slow, but bytes and shorts? This makes the porting of any graphics code from desktops to cellphones mind-numbingly difficult. Everything has to be torn out and carefully redesigned so that they work correctly with byte and short values for vertices. And such a design has a shelf-life of about two years because if 3-D graphics ever take off cellphones, floating-point units will be added to the devices, and developers will demand a new API with better floating-point support. Sure, I'm glad that Nokia is very proactive about defining new Java API standards for cellphones; otherwise, the latest cellphone features simply wouldn't be accessible from Java (or, at least, not in a standardized way). But I really do wish that Nokia would spend a little bit more time polishing their APIs before releasing them, so that the APIs wouldn't fall into obsolescence so quickly, necessitating the creation of yet another unpolished API to replace it, which'll become obsolete again in just a few years etc. etc.

Would it have really been so hard to allow vertices and normals to be defined using floating point values? Sure, it would be slow, but it would be nice to have that option at least. And adding that support would add another year or two to the life of the spec, at a minimum. I might expect this sort of lack of foresight from a bunch of amateur hacker coders, but I imagine that Nokia probably has some good people on this. I think it must be part of a larger corporate strategy of planned obsolescence in software. Because the old APIs are so limited and restrictive, developers will have to keep on moving on to newer APIs to make use of newer features. Since the new software is incompatible with older phones because the software makes use of the newer APIs, people have to upgrade their phones to use the newest software. And, if the new phones don't even bother to include the old APIs, then users can't just copy software from their old phone to their new phone; they have to buy all new software for each of their phones. This is good for the corporate establishment not only for the above reasons but also because it hinders piracy and allows vendors to control the availability of software on different platforms. All of this, of course, is meant to oppress the consumer and to wring as much profit as possible out of the pockets of the average worker, the elderly, and teenagers around the world.

Or, maybe Nokia just hired a bunch of amateur hacker coders.