java JOGL and similar resources

Question

just joined this awesome site… Ive recently been working in XNA on C#, making a library for that framework.

Ive gotten interested in java at was going to try making a similar library for java.

Thats when the problem arrived, there doesnt seem to be a standard 3d renderer on it.

Ive heard of JOGL, but it seemed to be discontinued (project inactive), and i prefet high level anyway,

Then I saw jMonkey and espresso 3D, but both seemed less efficient and less pretty then directx.

JavaFX discouraged me by saying that its for rich internet content.

My question is, which out of these are optimal. What is the technical difference between OpenGL and DirectX, are jMonkey and co. Actuallh effective? And if not is there a framework similar to XNA for java? I only ask you name some and point me in the right direction, as this got me a bit confused after the 1 way .NET xD.

Also, as this is my first post here, feel free to correct any mistaked I may have made.

Answer 1

The real standard 3D API for Java -- in the sense that it's the one that Sun once considered "official" -- is Java3D, which is a scene graph API, something like Open Inventor. I never liked it much, and the level of support these days is pretty low. But it's worth considering, if only for completeness.

Answer 2

I think jmonkeyengine or jogl are probably the best choices, but it really depends on what your doing. Jogl looks like its still going but is now part of a fuller set of libraries, jogamp, which covers sound and gpgpu programming as well as graphics.

http://jogamp.org/

Jogl is essentially a java wrapper around OpenGL, so will be low level and require to write shader code in order to do anything modern. Jmonkeyengine is probably more the sort of thing you're after since it comes with a lot of prepackaged functionality (including its own IDE).