Graphics programming for the web

  • Authors:
  • Pushkar Joshi;Mikaël Bourges-Sévenier;Kenneth Russell;Zhenyao Mo

  • Affiliations:
  • Motorola Mobility;Motorola Mobility;Google, Inc.;Google, Inc.

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGGRAPH 2012 Courses
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

With HTML5 and ever-improving browser performance, the web has emerged as an ideal platform for showcasing graphics applications. Several graphics applications that were once too slow to be written in anything but native code may now be fast enough to run as web apps. This course for developers who want to develop graphics applications for the web introduces the concepts of core web programming and the dominant graphics technologies that are supported by most modern browsers. It begins with a brief primer on general-purpose web programming (HTML parsing, CSS, and DOM- and render-tree construction), how Javascript can be used to generate dynamic web content, and how to improve performance and accelerate development time. The bulk of this course describes the web technologies specific to graphics: CSS3: transitions, animations, 3D transforms and the new CSS-shaders HTML5 Canvas 2D: path API, compositing, image editing, and animation SVG: overview of API, how it's different from HTML5 Canvas 2D WebGL: the key necessary steps, relation to OpenGL, performance hints WebCL: the formal specifications, what's implemented and what's to come For each topic, the course provides a significant number of code examples that illustrate the relevant graphics capabilities. Attendees are welcome to copy and paste our code snippets and execute them inside any modern web browser.