WebGL + Node.js + WebSockets = A Web Technology Perfect Storm

http://www.travisglines.com/uncategorized/webgl-node-js-websockets-a-web-technology-perfect-storm

by travisglines • 15 years ago

106 56 15 years ago

travisglines.com

dshankar• 15 years ago

http://labs.travisglines.com/

Very cool demo built by Travis, 3D WebGL chat

bad_user• 15 years ago

On the latest version of Chrome / Ubuntu Linux, doesn't work for me.

btmorex• 15 years ago

Works for me on the same (64 bit though).

That said, there's horrible tearing and it's also really slow when you are near another box and looking at it.

krat0sprakhar• 15 years ago

Windows XP/ Latest google chrome/ Firefox 4.0 .... Doesn't work for me either.

mcantelon3• 15 years ago

Did you run Chrome with "–enable-webg" flags set (don't know if they are default on Ubuntu/Linux?

nkassis2• 15 years ago

That should no longer be required. Some cards are blacklisted due to older drivers. Try updating your drivers to the lastest ones from NVIDIA or ATI. If that doesn't --ignore-gpu-blacklist might work but if your card is blacklisted it might crash your browser.

travisglines3• 15 years ago

Should now fall back to canvas rendering when webgl isn't supported.

JoshCole2• 15 years ago

Close your browser. Open the console. Open your browser with:

  google-chrome --enable-webgl --ignore-gpu-blacklist

drdaeman• 15 years ago

This does not work on Chromium 12.0.712.0 (79102) on Ubuntu 10.10. Everything just silently fails with "Error creating WebGL context." in JS console.

nkassis2• 15 years ago

Yeah I tend to agree that the in the last year and half web technologies have exploded in capabilities. And looking at what was traditionally only possible on the desktop, that category is slowly starting to dwindle.

Part of my job has been to remake visualization software (for brain imaging research) on the web and aside from some really heavy stuff, WebGL has served me well. Javascript engines are getting so fast, I haven't had problem computation heavy tasks that much. Most of the time it's my code that's shitty.

Now my most limiting factor is the damn slow upload speeds I get in canada. If only I could get 2-3 Mbps up, I could do some great stuff.

lux2• 15 years ago

That demo is good fun!

mcantelon3• 15 years ago

Hell yeah... that really felt like a bit of the future. Someone needs to make t-shirts with different color squares and the words "WHAT COLOR AM I?" over it.

benatkin• 15 years ago

Indeed it is! The best message I saw was, "I met my wife on here".

lux2• 15 years ago

That's awesome!

wh-uws2• 15 years ago

Great demo but you should have a warning because of that one color shifting block in the middle

http://webaim.org/articles/seizure/

or make it not do that

travisglines3• 15 years ago

I should make people spawn in random places instead off all at the same spot to change that (what you're seeing is like 100 overlapped blocks).

wh-uws2• 15 years ago

just recognized that. But yeah do that, to avoid that affect

sthatipamala2• 15 years ago

What is the purpose of the large black Kaabah structure in the middle?

jessedhillon3• 15 years ago

One of these is not like the others: node.js is a nice, progressive step forward, not a leap that is discontinuous with what preceded it like WebGL and WebSockets. And certainly, node.js did not enable this chat example to happen -- not in the same way that WebGL or WebSockets did.

<rant>I am getting a little tired with the node.js cheerleading on HN. I've tried it and I don't see it as a huge leap forward from what can be done with Twisted + Python, or Go, or many other solutions. The major drawback is that you're writing in Javascript -- and maybe I have been doing something wrong, but any sufficiently complex JS app tends towards callback spaghetti, in my experience. (And I do like writing JS)</rant>

sthatipamala2• 15 years ago

People are "cheerleading" node.js because they tried it, successfully built something with it and want to give proper credit to their stack.

The existence/prevalence of node.js submissions does not imply that anyone thinks it any more technologically capable than Twisted, Go, Tornado, or eventlet. Node.js just happens to be simpler to install, have more easily accessible documentation and has more of a network effect going for it.

jessedhillon3• 15 years ago

My point is that the proliferation of HN posts regarding node.js is not reflective or driven by a host of new and significant improvements that it brings to the table. I suppose one response is this shouldn't be surprising, since anything implemented after the 70s could have been done with C instead of language X.

But my complaint is that it seems a lot of attention is paid to projects which are not actually doing new things with node.js, just things that have already been done with other technologies.

Actually, this comment sums it up much better than my comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1549023

bambax2• 15 years ago

I use node.js for batch processing: it's just fantastic. Instead of ugly bash scripts that are absolutely unreadable and therefore unmaintainable, I get to write beautiful Javascript and lightning fast JSON processing and transformation. This is an area where node.js really shines and that is not often mentioned.

As for client-server development, I think the future is going back to the client. Instead of "dumb clients", what we have now are extremely powerful and fast clients. It's much cheaper to send raw data to the client and compute it there, since as a web developer you pay for server CPU, but not for client CPU. (Of course, it's a little wasteful since the computation happens many times instead of one; but you can always send the results back to the server for caching, if that worries you).

masklinn2• 15 years ago

> I use node.js for batch processing: it's just fantastic. Instead of ugly bash scripts that are absolutely unreadable and therefore unmaintainable

I am confused: if you don't like bash scripts why in science's sake did you keep using them instead of one of the billion alternatives out there?

> This is an area where node.js really shines and that is not often mentioned.

Because it's nonsensical. What makes node.js "shine" more at batch processing more than every other language on the planet?

Fester2• 15 years ago

Node.js is great because bash is ugly. Way to go indeed.

weixiyen• 15 years ago

> but any sufficiently complex JS app tends towards callback spaghetti

Callback spaghetti is quite easy to avoid.

> and maybe I have been doing something wrong

If you have callback spaghetti, regardless of the complexity of the app, you are most likely doing something wrong.

> I don't see it as a huge leap forward from what can be done with Twisted + Python, or Go

Of course not, but it's not hard to imagine that Node.js will have the biggest ecosystem in this space and with it comes advantages (and perhaps disadvantages).

gambler• 15 years ago

> Callback spaghetti is quite easy to avoid.

That's what people say about most bad programming practices. "It's not the language, you can write good code in the language." This doesn't really help, though. The reality of programming is that different languages encourage different styles of programming. They shape the eco-system, the space of the solutions you will find for you problems.

JavaScript lacks tools for managing complexity. I don't work with it a lot, but most of the JS code I've seen recently was, in fact, callback spaghetti (with arbitrary global state modifications). That's the ecosystem the language created. Hearing how it's avoidable doesn't make my life any easier when I work with such code.

jessedhillon3• 15 years ago

This is subjective and anecdotal, but every large JS framework whose source I've examined shows this tendency towards spaghetti.

mcantelon3• 15 years ago

I love the demo. Reminds me of Swarmation... people dropped into a new world there they have to figure out the rules and how to interact.

daveelkan2• 15 years ago

I love the demo for it's thought provoking stab in the brain. I love three.js and can't wait to tie it into my own app.

re: WebGL games. The clients will all be "open source" (as they're javascript). What effect do you all think that'll have on the future web-based gaming industry?

anty• 15 years ago

The most obvious problem is probably that it's way easier to develop bots/cheats for those games.

Since I'm currently developing a WebGL game I'm actively searching for ideas to detect that behavior.

The only solution I can think of is, to capture any data with timestamp coming from the client and applying some tests to it like "is the client sending more messages than a normal client" or more advanced: sending the input through a statistical filter to detect possible cheating and investigate from there on.

daveelkan2• 15 years ago

Sounds bloody hard!

It might be an idea to think about the actual mechanics of the game once you've come up with a possible solution so that the game itself doesn't invite cheating behaviour or at least makes it easier to detect. i.e. Making it physically impossible to shoot faster than a specified rate or move too quickly/accurately, etc.

Good luck!

drivebyacct2• 15 years ago

That was far too amusing. I found it interesting that we grouped on one spot on the monolith. I ventured out away from everyone twice, once apparently with the same person.

rachelbythebay• 15 years ago

This turns my laptop into a space heater. Nice, but not the sort of thing I'd want to run for extended periods of time.

bensummers• 15 years ago

Is there a secure version of WebSockets yet?

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/12/websockets-disabled-in-fire...

wmf• 15 years ago

Yes: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-hybi-thewebsocketproto...

Hopefully it will be re-enabled in Firefox 5.

kaib2• 15 years ago

WebSockets are really cool but we found the browser implementations unstable enough that we switched back to XHR for Tinkercad. Especially since the secure implementations were super shaky and we run all our traffic over SSL.

We also use Go and not Node.js for the backend so the only thing qualifying us for this perfect storm is WebGL.. :-)

MatthewPhillips• 15 years ago

I'd love to see a blog about your experience with using Go as your web server. Did you use the standard library, Web.go, or something else? There have only been a few deploy production web apps with Go so far, so the knowledge needs to spread.

kaib2• 15 years ago

For Tinkercad the http server is just a relatively simple transport layer, the magic happens with how the computation is distributed in the cluster. We'll blog about it once things settle down a bit, at this point we are just trying to soldier ahead with the beta. :-)

msy• 15 years ago

This is awesome but it does seem a touch depressing we've taken 15 years to incompletely replicate VRML. In the bleeding edge of one browser engine.

Fester2• 15 years ago

How can you compare OpenGL with XML?

Aetius• 15 years ago

<trivial app> in <less than 100LOC> with <new tech>.

Old meme is old!

Writing a chat app is one thing. Writing a node.js 3D MMO is quite another.

WebGL + Node.js + WebSockets = A Web Technology Perfect Storm

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