Using JOGL and SWT in Eclipse Java Projects

I recently decided that I want to learn OpenGL, so I started looking for OpenGL implementations in java. Having done a fair bit of programming with Eclipse’s Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) and java, I ideally wanted to integrate OpenGL with SWT. I didn’t particularly want to use AWT or Swing.

After looking around, I did find that SWT now supports OpenGL through Java bindings for OpenGL (JOGL). Finding source code to test this is not easy, but there’s a convenient torus example provided on the SWT site. This was perfect for testing that I had got my setup correct.

OpenGL Torus Window in SWT

Setting up SWT and JOGL can be annoying with Eclipse unless you know what to do. I tried the instructions that I found on the web a few times, but quickly ran into gotchas. I finally discovered the correct solution, which I’ll explain more clearly than what I found on the web.

My explanation assumes a basic familiarity with creating and running a java project in Eclipse. If you don’t know how to do this, I suggest starting with the Eclipse FAQs. My recommendation is to separate the program code from the SWT and JOGL libraries. This is particularly a good idea if you are playing with a few different SWT and JOGL projects within Eclipse.

So here we go (based on doing this for MS Windows):

  1. Download the SWT libraries (rather than use the library supplied with Eclipse).
  2. Download the JOGL libraries.
  3. Extract all of the .jar and .dll files in both SWT and JOGL packages to a common library folder, e.g. c:\libraries.
  4. In Eclipse, in your java project, open the project properties. Click on the Libraries tab, click on the Add External Jars button, go to the c:\libraries folder, and choose all of the .jar files. For the current versions of both toolkits, there should be 3 jar files (swt.jar, jogl.jar, gluegen-rt.jar). This will allow the project to compile SWT and JOGL without any errors relating to library dependencies.
  5. Now we want to run the application. Create a run profile as usual, but to the Arguments tab for the application in the VM arguments you need to define the location of the library using the flag -Djava.library.path=C:\Library
  6. The application should find the libraries correctly now, and should run!