OpenGL and X, Column 1: An OpenGL Toolkit

Welcome to the “OpenGL and X” column. This column is the outgrowth of my three-part series on programming OpenGL with the X Window System. The purpose of the column is to continue explaining how to put interactive 3D graphics into your X programs. In the past year, there’s been remarkable progress adopting OpenGL as the premier Application Programming Interface (API) for interactive 3D graphics. Major workstation vendors are supplying OpenGL for their X workstations: Digital, IBM, and Silicon Graphics. Independent software vendors (ISVs) have or are readying ports of OpenGL for Sun and HewlettPackard workstations. And OpenGL is not limited to the X world. OpenGL is also supported in a new version of IBM’s OS/2 and in Microsoft’s Windows NT 3.5 (code named Daytona). A very exciting development is the announcement of custom graphics chips designed specifically for OpenGL rendering. These chips, like the GLint chip from 3Dlabs, promise to make OpenGL graphics inexpensive and accessible. These developments point the way for OpenGL to be the catalyst that brings interactive 3D graphics into the computing mainstream. The past decade has shown that it takes a technically mature software interface with broad-based support to launch new computer technologies. For example, PostScript