Digital Ninja

Thankfully, I pull my head out of the sand once in a while to see what's going on out there in the world of web development. It seems that this tme I looked up to stare into the face of the WebGL standard that's coming into the scene.

For some nifty links on WebGL, see my Delicious bookmarks.

Prior to the last 10 years that I've spent developing web applications I had spent five or six years engaging computer graphics with a focus in 3D and animation. In 2000 I obtained Autodesk (was Alias then) Maya certification levels I and II. That was lightyears ahead of where I began, which was with a DOS command-line ray tracer called Polyray. This antique of the graphics world used a C like syntax to describe scene worlds that were then rendered - arduously over hours and hours, during which my father would demand to have his computer back - into a series of image files.

Now it's 2010 and it's coming full circle. I began scripting 3D scene worlds in 1993 with a ray tracer and now I can once again script them but this time it's bigger. WebGL is fully interactive with the JavaScript layer of the web browser. The applications and mashup potentials here are overwhelming! I've got 30 ideas rushing through my head and it's time to start immediately. Visualization has always been a boon for data analysis, and this is going to be key to my experiments.

For now, I've got some reading to catch up on and some shader languages to learn.

It seems I should really make some time to spend with Mango Blog. First, I'm not even using the latest version. And I'm scared to use the auto-updater for fear of using my files so I need to make more time to get a backup of things. Second, the spammers are getting right past the captcha and my posts are completely sullied with all kinds of garbage. I'm going to have to remove thousands of comments via a MySQL query to get it cleaned up. This also means I need to make time to learn how to lock this thing down better, and until then I'm disabling all comments.

I've got a new obsession, and that means I'm going to be posting more (famous last words?) and it's going to be about WebGL.ﾠ It's going to get good.

This is something I found interesting tonight. I made a CFC that sets private (variables scope) variables from the init parameters. They were not available by accessing them as obj.property, as expected. But when run through the serializeJSON function, those became available. I didn't expect this, but I think it's going to be handy for using them as lightweight transfer objects.

I thought it was worth a quick post before I call it a night. Lately as I converse with colleagues who are getting more and more into the whole "Web 2.0" thing and therefore using more AJAX and JSON, I notice I'm sometimes the only one in the circle who recalls the awesome ColdFusion function JSStringFormat.

With this function you can take any amount of content and make it JavaScript friendly - you know, escaping single quotes and all that jazz. Even better is when you couple it with the cfsavecontent tag. Check this out, it's how I make a no-flash display.

<cfsavecontent variable="foo">This is some markup, can contain tons and tons of tags, even other script, etc.</cfsavecontent>
<cfoutput>
<script language="text/javascript">
var foo = '#JSStringFormat(foo)#';
</script>
</cfoutput>

Let's see if I can easily get a medium sized image in here via Google Picasa's standard embed code.