[vtkusers] VTK and Java

[Chris Johnson]

Dear Will, Liya, Jeff, Randy, Ahmed, Phil, etc.,

This email concerns the use of java with vtk4.0 on a solaris system. As
anyone who has attempted to get these facilities to work together will
know, or indeed anyone who keeps an eye on this mailing list, this
exercise is not straightforward. In fact so far we have not been able to
get this to work at all...

Has anybody on this list managed to make this to work?

The problem we are facing is the well-documented

java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError

This error seems to appear with a seemingly random library file which it
claims not to find (e.g. vtkIOJava or vtkCommonJava), despite these
files being blatantly on the library path, with all permissions set
correctly (There are undefined symbols in these files, e.g.
jpeg_start_compress in libvtkIOJava.so - has anyone encountered/overcome
this?). We believe our CLASSPATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH to be set correctly.

Vtk has been installed now by at least 3 different people here on at
least 2 separate sun systems running solaris 8. We have tried vtk3.2 and
also vtk4.0. We have also tried at least 2 versions of java (j2sdk1_3_1
and j2sdk1.4.0). We have tried setting our CLASSPATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH to
several different things.

I have seen the email from Phil Varner on 5th Mar 2002, and this appears
to fill in some of the gaps in the present documentation. However, this
doesn't appear to work for solaris. Phil, could you summarise what you
did (to create the nightly release) in the linux case? Ahmed, Randy you
recently indicated that this works?

Are we going about this the right way? Having built and installed vtk we
have successfully compiled some java examples, and then attempted to run
them using `java' at the command line. Is this what is intended? What
are the `vtkWrapJava' files for in the Wrapping directory? Are we
supposed to run these? If so, how do we go about this?

The FAQ states that the system has been tested on suns. Is this really
the case? If so, was java tested? Obviously the FAQ's need to be updated
to reflect the problems. It seems that it is possible to edit these
ourselves. If so, what do people think it should say, i.e. does anyone
know what works and what doesn't?

We are about to run an MSc course on here at Edinburgh University, and
it would be much better if we could teach vtk visualisation to its full
potential, rather than just putting up a few tcl examples, which is what
we will probably have to do at this stage. Ideally we would run jobs in
parallel using the large array of facilities we have here, however there
is no way of doing this if we can't run on solaris.

We have purchased two copies of the user guide and intend to purchase a
couple of the 4.0. version. We have also put a considerable amount of
manpower into vtk, but have so far not got very far, and the java troubles
have severely encroached upon our vtk learning time.

Can anybody help?

Many Thanks in advance.

Chris

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