[x3d-public] JSweet translation of X3DJSAIL to JavaScript: need specific design goals first

[John Carlson]

On Tue, Mar 24, 2020 at 8:20 AM Don Brutzman wrote:

Authoring use-case environments are
> 1. Script inside X3D scene graph,
> 2. Script in outer HTML5 web page,
> 3. Standalone programmatic use in node.js
>
> Now get specific.
>

Not yet.   We need to discuss the environments.   X_ITE does inside X3D,
and with the addition of X_ITE_DOM, in outer HTML5. X3DOM does outer HTML5.
X3DJSAIL is a standalone library.

So what we really need is a standalone EAI for node.js without rendering
except to an encoding.  Can we turn either X3DJSAIL, X_ITE or X3DOM into
such an environment?  I provided a solution for Nashorn on top of X3DJSAIL,
but not a solution for node.js. Have we had any take up on the Nashorn
solution, enough to warrant a node.js solution?

So I would recommend that before researching all the various Transforms,
that we just try to develop a single Transform.js class for node.js, with
an encoding rendering.  It will be throwaway code, just a proof of concept.

Suggestions for next steps are welcome, and I will review Don's email again
and see what he said.

For node.js, I believe there are packages that emulate the browser
enviroment, i think that jsdom (?) and xmldom are two popular ones, so we
can look at turning node.js into a headless browser.   There are also ways
to run browsers in headless mode, PhantomJs comes to mind, but I haven't
researched this extensively.

There are environments for running Java and node.js together, as I
demonstrated with RunSaxon.java in X3DJSONLD.  My approach for that was
simplistic, and won't really work for a multiclass approach.  There is also
the java npm package that may lead towards a solution.

So a possible path forward is generating the glue code between node.js and
Java, similar to what we did for PyJNIus.

I suggest that we do a very simple single class solution, not unlike the
RunSaxon.java solution. This required various node.js files.   I think the
new solution will be more complex to deal with the npm java peculiarities.

So this is throwaway code for now, just a single class.

Note that I have been stripping RunSaxon code out of my code, since I have
a XML to JSON solution.

What do you think?

John
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