I’m Cameron. I’ve never had a blog before. It’s strange to think that I will be “writing” down something that just about anybody who randomly stumbles here could read, so this will take some getting used to. Well, I currently am studying at California State University, Northridge (CSUN) for a Comp-Sci degree and a friend of mine thought having this page would help me organize my thoughts while I learn to code WebGL, possibly by creating tutorials. To begin, I thought I would simply go through the bare essentials for beginning to understand what WebGL is and what it could be used for.
According to Khronos’s WebGL Wiki page, its purpose is to provide a “a cross-platform, royalty-free API…to create 3D graphics in a Web browser”. That seems pretty straightforward. Its based on the popular OpenGL language, the famous graphics computing language, but has been made available in a scripting environment which is fully integrated will all DOM interfaces. With that comes the following (taken directly from the wiki page):
- Cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility
- Tight integration with HTML content, including layered compositing, interaction with other HTML elements, and use of the standard HTML event handling mechanisms
- Hardware-accelerated 3D graphics for the browser environment
- A scripting environment that makes it easy to prototype 3D graphics—you don’t need to compile and link before you can view and debug the rendered graphics
It’s easy to get excited about #1, having a cross-platform solution for graphics rendering can help open the door to customers who have largely been ignored until recently. More importantly, it makes it easy for the developer to have a single solution for just about every potential user without having to port the same project to each new system. #2 mentions the option to integrate graphics rendering with all other web tools. Page elements, events, callbacks and everything to do with DOM interfaces can be directly related to the 3D rendering interface and vice versa. Point #3 is self-explanatory. The WebGL contexts are able to make use of hardware acceleration, which means putting that graphics card to good use. The last point again mentions the integration of WebGL into any familiar DOM-compatible language like Java or Javascript, so you could use a lot of the same tools you’re already familiar with!
I think that’s about all I’ll start off with for now. For the next post, I’ll start to get into actually creating the contexts used to control what is displayed in a canvas element (our new favorite element).