[ODE] ODE for Java v0.1 released

[Tim Schmidt]

Hi!

I am pleased to announce that the first release of 'ODE for Java' is 
available via:

         http://www.tim-schmidt.de/odeforjava/

Additionally to just making ODE available in Java, it provides a set of 
Java3D objects that can hopefully be used without detailed knowledge of 
ODE internals.

This release is version v0.1 and it should work with:
- JDK 1.3
- Java3d 1.2.1-03

Please note:
- The JNI covers the ODE functionality that was available around june
   2002.
- The ode.core.extensions and ode.java3d.geometry.sensors packages use
   objects that can be found in ode/core/extensions/ode-src. To integrate
   them into ODE itself follow the instructions that are given in
   contrib/GeomTransformGroup/README.txt in the ODE CVS tree.
- At the current stage I can not guarantee that the API will not change
   to a certain extent.
- There may still be several bugs in the code, especially as respects
   garbage collection (so watch out for memory leaks)

The lib/ directory contains precompiled linux libraries of ODE and
'ODE for Java' that have to be reacheable through the LD_LIBRARY_PATH
environment variable.

The provided archive development.tar.bz2 is ready to use for your own
development. It contains the source code of this project and a set of
makefiles that represent a modification and extension of 'The Universal
Makefile' which can be found at http://geosoft.no/javamake.html.
The latter is rather designed for unix/linux environments but with loss 
of functionality it may be adapted to work with windows, too. Just make 
sure that:
- the environment variable JAVA_DEV_ROOT points to the development
   directory that is created after the unpacking of development.tar.bz2
- the environment variable JAVA_HOME points to your Java SDK directory

Have a look at the examples in the ode.java3d.test package. They should
give a good impression how everything is set up, at least for those who 
are already familiar with Java3D scene graph assembly.

Feel free to send bug reports and comments to odeforjava@tim-schmidt.de.

And finally I don't want to forget to thank Russ for his really great 
work!!! :-)))


kind regards,

       Tim Schmidt