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First glSteps() in Javascript

August 1st, 2007 · No Comments

The screenshots above show the very first Vision Factory plugin whose rendering is completely made with Javascript. All the drawing commands and logic are handled within a single script, which can be modified and recompiled while the main program is running.
This was made possible through the integration of jslibs (built upon Spidermonkey). According to its author,

jslibs a standalone Javascript development environment whose aim is to turn Javascript into a general-purpose scripting language. It provides a set of native modules that contains various general-purpose classes and functions.

jslibs currently works on PC and is being ported to Linux. With little effort though, I was able to compile and run the OpenGL module on MacOS.

Having these scripting capalities inside the framework opens up a lot of possibilities and undoubtedly adds some confort in the development process : no rebuild / compilation of the core application, easy set-up process, live tweaking of parameters and functions calls.
Ultimately, you can delegate all of your non time-critical functionnalities inside a script as it’s relatively easy to combine both worlds (c++ / javascript) once you get used to Spidermonkey api. As a first application, I’ve planned to write a javascript timeline module that will allow to write some kind of ’scenarios’ in Vision Factory, in a demo-like way.

Speaking of Vision Factory, I wasn’t able to work on it as much as I wanted in the past few months. Much much work at the office, and well … real life is taking time too :-) I think an optimistic release date would be this fall. Anyway, thanks for all of you who have registered and shown interest, that’s very motivating !


If you’re interested in having a look, here are the scripts used to run this application :

Tags: OpenGL · Vision Factory

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