Spaciblog

WebGL Camp Videos Online!

I had a fun time meeting the movers and shakers in the WebGL community, and they've posted all of the WebGLCamp talk videos.

I received quite a bit of positive feedback about where Spaciblō is going. People really tuned into the idea that we should give web developers with no 3D experience the ability to hit the ground running so that they can try out a wide variety of interaction and development techniques.

WebGL Camp

I'll be talking at WebGL Camp about the hows and whys of Spaciblō. The basic premise of my talk is that WebGL isn't fun yet, we really have no idea how to use it properly, and we need open stacks like Spaciblō so that a thousand little dev teams can try out weird and wonderful design and development techniques.

The rumor is that they'll be streaming video live and then recordings will follow, so you can gawk at little old me presenting between heavyweights like the Google Chrome 3D team and the guy who built WebGL for Mozilla.

I'll be the tall nervous one.

Templates, Things, Pluggable Django Apps

I've been poking around the internals of Django with the goal of understanding how I might dynamically load and unload templates such that each thing in spaces can have its own little branch of the URL tree in order to respond to requests for both HTML UIs and RESTful APIs. Basically, I want a template to be able to specify something that looks a lot like a Django app and then map it into and out of URL space on the fly.

There's a bit of overlap with the pluggable app project, in that the template web app needs to work when rooted anywhere in the URL tree and there will be multiple copies of the template web app loaded in the same Django process.

So, I've prodded Django's RegexURLResolver and now I can map from an incoming URL to a template's view method using the template's url patterns. That's part of the battle, with the remainder revolving around how to manage loading and unloading the python modules of the template while maintaining enough separation between versions.

I am constantly impressed with the cleanliness of the Django core and I'm learning a lot of nifty patterns while doing things the Django devs never expected.

The Many Faces of Spaciblō

Even when I'm not actively blogging you can see what's going on behind the scenes by visiting the Spaciblō commits page. I tend to provide human readable comments for each check-in so it's a good way to take the pulse of the project.

The last commit message was this:

"Changed the Obj to Geometry pipeline a bit, currently ignoring faces which have more than three points. Moved the authorization marking in the ground API forward, though it still is not hooked into the views. Sketched out how templates will provide their web app nature."

So, as you can see I'm working toward bringing a simple 3D renderer online by converting Obj data into the Spaciblō native Geometry model, which then emits JSON for transfer to the browser which hands it to WebGL.

The Ground API (the Django app which provides the RESTful API for the various models and plain python objects of the project) is coming along, and now I've sketched out code which defines how developers can mark up models with access and authentication information.

Finally, I'm thinking a bit about how to test Thesis 1 on the front page of the Spaciblō wiki, which talks about how things in spaces are actually full fledged web apps with RESTful APIs and HTML UIs. So in that last commit I sketched out how the example templates might include that app nature using Django patterns.

If any of this sounds interesting, you may be interested in the Spaciblō issues list, which lists all of the various pieces of work which remain in the project.

onload = hello("I'm Trevor")

Hello, my name is Trevor and I'll be your code wrangler.

After a few months of talking with people about the project and laying down a bit of foundation, it feels like a good time to open up the Spaciblō repository as a first step towards gathering people who are interested in building a toolkit for social spaces on the web.

I'm a recovering CEO so I'll use this blog to document the project's history and profile people who are using Spaciblō tools to grow their communities and push their businesses. But I'm also a huge geek so don't be surprised if you find the occasional post about the esoteric machinations of web browsers and servers.