Canvas 3d JS Library

Portable Canvas version 0.2 is available!!

It is now a usable browser, but restricted to pages on c3dl.org only. It can display canvas elements right out of the box, and doesn’t require anything else to be on your system (not even FF3!)*. It’s only been tested on Windows XP, but in theory it should be easy to port to other platforms.

The removal of the URL bar (and the ability to visit sites outside c3dl.org) has been explained by security. The canvas library has direct access to your video card (via Open GL calls). Allowing anyone the ability to create a canvas element, host it somewhere, and link it to you, will potentially allow them to do damage to your video card. However, we can guarantee that any canvas element on c3dl.org will be safe.

The unanswered question I’m left with is, “What happens when you want your canvas application to access a SQL server?” As far as I know, canvas elements can’t (and shouldn’t) hold or run SQL querries; they’d have to be run by a host php page or similar. Will we support these kinds of applications for use with portable canvas? Will we host them on c3dl.org? What if these applications use a technology that isn’t available on c3dl’s web server (such as Iron Python)?

We are in the beginning phases of c3dl development. It makes sense to focus on tools that develop canvas elements. But, while changes are still easy to make, we should consider how canvas 3d might be combined with other technologies for complex applications further down the road. (There’s probably an article on this topic that I should’ve read by now, and that I can hang my head in shame for not knowing about…)

The discussion page for this can be found at: http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/Canvas3D_XUL_Runner_App_0.2

For convenience, you can download portable canvas 0.2 from here.

* I lie. You will need an Internet connection.