GwtGL examples and Opera

A few weeks ago, a preview of Opera with WebGL support was published.

I activated Opera in the GwtGL examples (not live on http://gwtgl-examples.appspot.com/):

Now our *.gwt.xml looks like this:

GwtGL and GWT 2.2 Canvas

As mentioned in my last post, GwtGL 0.9 will bring basic support for the GWT 2.2 Canvas widget.

But how must the Code be changed to use that?
At the moment, you have sth. like this to initialize your WebGLCanvas:

WebGLCanvas webGLCanvas = new WebGLCanvas("500px", "500px");

glContext = webGLCanvas.getGlContext();

glContext.viewport(0, 0, 500, 500);
[...]

To use the GWT 2.2 Canvas you must include the GWT module containing the canvas widget:

<inherits name='com.google.gwt.canvas.Canvas'/>

and change the initialization code to:

webGLCanvas = Canvas.createIfSupported();
webGLCanvas.setCoordinateSpaceHeight(500);
webGLCanvas.setCoordinateSpaceWidth(500);
glContext = (WebGLRenderingContext) webGLCanvas.getContext("experimental-webgl");
glContext.viewport(0, 0, 500, 500);
[...]

Remember: The Canvas and WebGLRenderingContext can both be null if the browser doesn't support Canvas or WebGL.


Now that it's possible to use a standard GWT widget for GwtGL, our own WebGLCanvas will be deprecated. But we don't delete it as you can't use the WebGLContextAttributes with the GWT 2.2 Canvas.

Updated GwtGL Roadmap

Much has changed in the last weeks:

• WebGL 1.0 is final! 
• Google Chrome 10 supports WebGL
• Firefox 4 (of course with WebGL support) is on its way
• A first preview of Opera with WebGL support was released

So we decided to update the GwtGL roadmap. We planned 3 releases:

• 0.3 will be released to support Chrome 10 and Firefox 4
• 0.9 will provide support for the GWT 2.2 Canvas widget together with a renewal of the WebGlRenderingContext.
• 1.0 will be our first stable release

Sadly GwtGL 0.9 will break some of the existing APIs.

GwtGL release 0.1

GwtGL (the WebGL binding for GWT) has reached its first release.
A short overview of the things we've done in the last ~2 months:

• A generator based approach to bind the methods and constants of the WebGLRenderingContex
• A JavaScriptObject for every object in the WebGL specification
• A basic object oriented wrapper with enums and a set of wrapper objects
• All with JavaDocs
• Documentation in our wiki 
• Demos

The best moment in this time was in the beginning (after 2 days of work) when the first triangle rendered without JavaScript error ;)

Have fun playing with GwtGL and the demos.