Web3D Working Group meetings at SIGGRAPH 2012 8 3 AM Minutes

From Web3D.org
Jump to: navigation, search

Minutes of meeting held 3 August 2012 8:00 AM PDT.

Really helpful discussions today!

Attendees at one or more meetings


People interested in the CAD Working Group are asked to refresh their entries on the X3D CAD People page where we summarize our interests.

CAD BOF Preparations

  • See Web3D Birds of a Feather Agenda for CAD_BoF_2012
    • Can we get Peter Schickel or someone from Bit Management discuss new BS Contact Browser?
    • Players supporting CAD can be found on the Player support for X3D components page. Players reporting support are BS Contact, Instant Player, Octaga VS, Swirl, and Xj3d. Can we help OpenVRML and view3dscene go from partial to full support?
  • X3DOM support does not appear to include CAD Geometry. X3DOM is open source and some ambitious person may be able to implement the Javascript addition to X3DOM to support CAD nodes.
    • Tools that don't fully support CAD Geometry (FreeWRL, H3DView, OpenVRML, view3dscene) may use the CAD Prototypes implementation or other open source - these nodes are pretty easy to implement.
    • Issue for future discussion: Is there a difference in how feasible it is to implement the proposed changes to X3DPart/X3DFace nodes in Prototypes among the 3 options we have recently discussed [1]?

Xj3D Source Progress

  • Xj3d Site [2] is back up, after a 10 day down period; includes web access to subversion repository
    • Alan reports that everything is now paid through May
    • a number of changes were received that seem to build OK.
  • We discussed next steps for Xj3d source
    • Steps a-d (restoration of site for next 2 months) have been accomplished -- Thanks to Alan Hudson!
    • Option e, moving Subversion repository to SourceForge will be straightforward -- use subversion archive file to move to a new Subversion server.
    • Option f, converting to git version control, and moving to GitHub, will require some careful consideration. It can be a steep learning curve for developers to transition from subversion to git. Conversion from a subversion repository to git can be automated, but it will be difficult to go back to subversion from git.
  • NURBS future tasks
    • Terry and Vince will finish integration of Vince's NURBS improvements into the Xj3D branch, then once ready integrate into the trunk
    • Don and Mike Bailey NPS will update X3D-Edit to include new NURBS support
    • Vince and Don will test each of the NURBS Examples in detail, improving scenes/X3D-Edit/Xj3D as appropriate. Possibly some specification refinements might also result from this testing.
  • VT Future Tasks
    • Felipe Bacim and Nick Polys of Virginia Tech have some improvements that might be added also. He has some possible changes for stereo audio support, and also some possibly reusable code for cursors. This was done as part of the SAFAS project.
    • Felipe, please post potential changes to the source list since Rex Melton and Alan Hudson think that much of this is already fixed and working in the main trunk
  • PartDB Future Tasks
    • Hyo has a number of changes that we hope to integrate also, he will work with Terry Norbraten to review and integrate them as appropriate.
    • Mostly this is a new application: an X3D viewing tool that also shows CAD model product structure (as a tree in a side panel). There are also some high-level functions available.
    • Hyo showed a demo that he will present at the CAD BOF, and will post some images to the lists
    • Xj3D has Java internationalization capabilities already, which are fairly simple and are basically adding multiple .properties files holding labels for each human language. We will explore this further when we integrate Hyo's application.
  • JNLP Future Tasks
    • Hyo also showed Java WebStart working in Internet Explorer which is pretty cool
    • Rex has a Java WebStart .jnlp that he will check in - a certificate is needed for signing them
    • Stripped-down versions might get as small as a few megabytes, not 100% sure yet how big a "full" version might be but probably ~20MB. It is a one-time download and then it is placed in the Java cache and available to the client repeatedly after that.
    • TODO we should add documentation for this... Rex can post some ant script code and results.
    • Should the group purchase a signing certificate for Xj3D .jnlps or let individual developers do that? Let's consider whether a Web3D certificate for such a general version is useful.
    • Creating, deploying and maintaining is another set of tasks... NPS can capture the build process as part of the Xj3D Nightly Build on the Savage Jenkins server, and either deploy via savage.nps.edu (easy) or another server (if desired)
    • Don can integrate this publication capability into X3D-Edit
  • Additional Xj3D Development Goals
    • Developer-level releases on a regular basis (not necessarily for the whole browser) while maintaining a very stable version on the head
    • ShapeWays is most interested in the server-side convert tasks
    • Contributors for website html and developer documentation improvements
    • More tests added to the test suite
    • Key errors to fix: Extrusion, Text vertical alignment, Binary compression errors (especially ProtoInstance)

Let's consider whether we should move Xj3D to SourceForge soon. We don't have to wait until next May to make a transition, which could help a lot for exposure, automation of tasks, good support, etc. etc.

jgeom Open Source Library for NURBS

  • jgeom library: The jgeom.net Java library was developed by Sam Gerber and is used in the implementation of the NURBS component for the Xj3D browser. It was originally licensed under the GPL license, and this posed difficulties in distributing this library with Xj3d -- the GPL license is viral and incompatible with the other licensing used in Xj3D.
  • Sam Gerber has agreed to allow us to distribute the jgeom library and source code under the LGPL (Lesser GPL) license. His permission to relicense jgeom on SourceForge is a great assist to Xj3D development.
  • A jgeom project has been created on SourceForge site, it is currently visible only to developers but will be published and publicly visible once we get the initial codebase uploaded
  • Vince will upload the code -- expect this to be accomplished by Aug 6.
  • We will establish a build.xml file of ant tasks to perform compilation, tests etc.
  • We will also create jgeom.jar for replacement of the .jar already deployed in the Xj3D lib/ directory.
  • If someone needs to be a developer of this project, please contact Vince or Don with your SourceForge account name for addition
  • Alan checked whether there is a dependency on the previous jgeom-core.jar already in the codebase... there are none. He is leaving it there and we can wait for the replacement.

X3D CAD and NURBS Example Scenes

  • We looked at X3D CAD scenes and NURBS scenes in the X3D Basic Examples Archive
  • For archive clarity and consistency, it is important for file names to match our suggested X3D Naming Conventions and meta Tag Conventions
  • Looked at the example files submitted to support our work on Mantis Ticket 528, the extension to the CAD nodes allowing CADFaces to be independently positioned. The files currently named "Test CAD Transform (A|B|C)" will be removed from "Examples" archives as they are not valid X3D, but will be be archived with better documentation in the naming and metatags. Examples have been renamed to CADPartChildTransformationAlternative{A|B|C}, which are not valid, and CADPartChildNoTransformation, which is valid. TODO: Add links on the Mantis Bug Tracker Ticket 528 back to this example.
Retrieved from "https://web3d.org/wiki/index.php?title=Web3D_Working_Group_meetings_at_SIGGRAPH_2012_8_3_AM_Minutes&oldid=6268"