openGL and JOGL

History

Anwendung

OpenGL-API

OpenGL-Implementierung

Graphics Hardware

In the years before openGL, developing software that could function with a wide range of graphics hardware and all of their different interfaces was time consuming. Each team of programmers developed interfaces separately, and there was consequently much duplicated code.

Silicon Graphics (SGI) was the world leader in 3D graphics at the time, SGI naturally saw this hardware interface problem. SGI already had a proprietary graphics API called IrisGL, which was starting to show its age.
SGI solved two problems in one by radically cleaning up IrisGL and opening up the standard to other companies. The result is known as OpenGL.

OpenGL standardised access to hardware, and had in this way had a remarkable impact by giving software developers a higher level platform for 3D-software development.

In 1992, SGI led the creation of the OpenGL architectural review board (OpenGL ARB), the group of companies that would maintain and expand OpenGL.

OpenGL 2.0 was conceived by 3Dlabs with a number of major additions to the standard (extensions), the most significant of which was GLSL (the OpenGL Shading Language).