WebGL support in JavaFX WebView

[Michael Hoffer]

Hi Paul,

a while ago I started an experiment that adds shared memory based nodes to
the scene graph. You can find an experimental WebKit node with full WebGL
support on GitHub: https://github.com/miho/VFXWebKit Here you can see it in
action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlIrY1SlNM4

As I said, it is only an experiment. As it tries to use public APIs as much
as possible it is quite slow, since to my knowledge, native memory buffers
cannot be used for rendering images.

Hi all,

I think we should definitely add the possibility to render native buffers.
Following this mailing list for quite some time now, I get the impression
that many of the complaints about missing features could be integrated much
easier and with more community involvement.

If you compare my WebKit hack with the official WebKit support, it is clear
that the official version has a much tighter integration with JavaFX
rendering. Updating to a newer version is very hard to achieve and consumes
many resources. But for many applications, a shared memory approach is
sufficient and much easier to implement. My experiment was done in just a
few days. Updating to a new WebKit/Blink version works like a charm since
it does not need any Java or JavaFX specific changes.

Additionally, a crash in the native code keeps the JVM alive and just needs
a restart of the native rendering process. That's cool, isn't it?

That being said, I fully understand that the tight integration has
advantages too. So it is not my intention to speak against the built-in
WebView.

But allowing native rendering has further benefits than integrating WebKit
or Blink. Any native rendering that can render to offscreen memory will be
instantly supported (JOGL, VTK, Qt and so much more!). Community members
could add so many new features, such a Blink based web views, JOGL nodes
and even X11 views without the need to make new JavaFX API proposals for
each and every rendering technology.

I also have a very personal motivation. I am actively advocating and
teaching Java and JavaFX at Universities in the context of scientific
computing. And I am so sad that for some things we cannot use JavaFX, e.g.,
for highly complex 3d visualizations. Adding native buffer/rendering
support would radically change that situation. We could integrate specific
scientific visualization toolkits into the JavaFX scene graph and so much
more! That would be so awesome!

Please check out the GitHub experiment. For shared memory on the native
side I used boost shared_mem stuff. So it should also work on Windows. But
currently, everything is setup to work on OS X.

Anyone who supports this idea, please let's talk about potential API
proposals!

Regards,
Michael Hoffer





2016-06-15 16:30 GMT+02:00 Kondratko, Paul <Paul.Kondratko at morganstanley.com
>:

> Hi,
>
> WebView that comes with JavaFX does not support WebGL. I understand from
> other online posts that there is no plan to add WebGL support.
>
> Is anyone familiar with a webView plugin that supports WebGL? Ideally open
> source.
>
> Thank you and Best Regards,
> Paul
>
>
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-- 
Dipl.-Math. Michael Hoffer

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