Almost two weeks ago (sorry, I have been busy), news broke that the WebGL project had taken a significant step forward by releasing a draft specification. Yay; I don’t hear you cry!
What is WebGL? It is a plugin-free API project being developed by several companies within the Khronos group including Apple, Google, Mozilla and Opera. This attempt at a standard basically brings 3d to the browser by extending the HTML canvas element. It does this by allowing JavaScript access to OpenGL 2.0 calls – this allows hardware accelerated 3d graphics within a browser.
This is quite exciting; in my younger years I developed several 3d games using OpenGL (and c++), although to be fair the same is probably true of every programmer. The point I was trying to make is that I found OpenGL to be easy to use and a flexible and powerful way to draw to the screen.
This is a fairly natural progression given that browsers are now leaning toward hardware accelerated rendering anyway, and now that this spec (which can be found here: https://www.khronos.org/webgl/) is out, we should start to see some very impressive demos emerging (some examples can already be found here. Although be aware that you do need a WebGL enabled browser, which means a fairly recent build rather than the more mainstream ones).
So, all together now – yay! Merry Christmas all.
Nick Nawrattel
Lead Multimedia Developer
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