Features And Design Choices in SpiderGL.

Di Benedetto M., Ganovelli F., Banterle F.

webGL  OpenGL  OpenGL ES  web  javascript 

Technologies related to Computer Graphics (CG) are constantly growing. This is mostly due to the widespread availability of 3D acceleration hard- ware with an unprecedented ratio of performance to cost. In the past, access to such accelerators was conned to workstations; nowadays, even hand-held devices such as smartphones are equipped with powerful graph- ics hardware. On a parallel time line, with the introduction of OpenGL, CG software moved to proprietary solutions from royalty free specications. In addition, widespread access to broadband Internet connections led to a tremendous increase in content availability, as well as a great enrichment of web technologies, such as HTML5. In this mature scenario, the WebGL specication was introduced to allow CG and Web programmers to leverage the power of GPUs directly within web pages. WebGL is a powerful technology based on the OpenGLjES 2.0 specication, and it thus adheres the philosophy of a barebones low-level API. As it happens in similar contexts, a series of higher-level libraries have been developed to ease usage and implement more complex constructs. SpiderGL [Di Benedetto et al. 10] is a JavaScript CG library that uses WebGL for real-time rendering. The library exposes a series of utilities, data structures, and algorithms to serve typical graphics tasks. When de- veloping SpiderGL, we wanted to create a library able to simplify the most common usage pattern of WebGL, and that could guarantee a seamless in- tegration into complex software packages. Its role of middleware imposed on us a need to enforce consistency whenever users wanted to access the underlying WebGL layer, and to provide a solid foundation for the devel- opment of higher-level components.

Source: OpenGL Insights, edited by Patrick Cozzi and Christophe Riccio, pp. 583–604. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2012

Publisher: CRC Press, Boca Raton, USA