The more I look at what this guy has done, the more I find it objectionable and fraudulent. Depending on the your culture, he has enormous chutzpah or cajones. It takes a lot of them to call what he has done glsl.js; that's the fraudulent part. He's taken a small part of GLSL, which is specified by a internationally recognized standard, and tacked on a js tag. Contrast that to something like Mesa which is the OpenGL used on most linux implementations. Because the original mesa couldn't quite pass the OpenGL conformance tests, they were honest enough to give it another name, even though it was pretty close and implemented all of OpenGL. As I remember, they only failed a few conformance tests at the pixel level.
If I ignore that part and look at what he has done, it's really not very useful and not extendable. He uses only a fragment shader to manipulate a 2D canvas. Besides being questionable as to what's the point,
he really can't extend that model to 3D since then you'd need understand the whole pipeline and vertex shaders. The fact that he can develop an example application in a few minutes shouldn't be surprising when he developed the software. I doubt a new user could do anything like that. I can develop applications in WebGL very quickly now but that doesn't prove much.
The part that Owen and I talked about putting into a small library, like the initialization of program objects, could be done fairly simply with a library as can most of the matrix/vector functions needed. The part I find most problematic is that I don't have operator overloading in JS so comparing functionality in the application with similar functionality in a shader is much more difficult than with C++ and OpenGL.
I've spent a fair amount of time with the WebGL Beginner's Guide by Cantor and Jones. It has a great selection of examples. My only problem with it is their decision to use a scene graph model with lots of classes to build applications. Although it usually doesn't get in the way of understanding most of WebGL, if you look at their examples, they load in 15-20 JS files for a single demo which makes it hard to figure out what part is standard WebGL and what part is theirs.
Ed
__________
Ed Angel
Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico
1017 Sierra Pinon
On Feb 20, 2013, at 9:53 AM, Owen Densmore wrote:
Ed and I were talking about a minimal webgl library, one that removes all the annoyances of creating program objects, building attribute arrays etc. But not much more. No "game" engine etc.
Glsl is a library attempting to do this sort of thing.
http://blog.greweb.fr/2013/02/glsl-js-a-javascript-glsl-library-dry-efficient/
It is pretty limited but it does have a refreshing new approach.
The video is kinda nifty .. an editor and browser side-by-side and every change in the program is immediately visible in the browser.
-- Owen
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