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I'm looking into the possibilities of creating a Javascript application which makes use webGL.
Since webGL is only available in a couple of browsers, and I do not want to force people to use a certain browser (directly), I would like to offer a standalone app client download aswell.
Would it be possible to somehow create a borderless and standalone "fake browser" client which has my app embedded for both linux and windows?
This would allow me to distribute a standalone client without having to modifiy my application code.
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WebGL (Web Graphics Library) is a JavaScript API for rendering high-performance interactive 3D and 2D graphics within any compatible web browser without the use of plug-ins. WebGL does so by introducing an API that closely conforms to OpenGL ES 2.0 that can be used in HTML <canvas> elements.
WebGL is much slower on the same hardware compared to equivalent OpenGL, because of the high overheard for each WebGL call. On desktop OpenGL, this overhead is at least limited, if still relatively expensive.
jslibs is a standalone JavaScript runtime that has a good support of OpenGL. Look at these samples.
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WebGL support has been offered in WebKit builds for more than a year. So if your clients use Macintosh computers then you could create a standalone application using WebKit.
And that is just for the time being. By next year, I think you will see support for WebGL in every major browser except IE, which is experiencing a dwindling user base.
Alternatively, you could write a plugin/addon for each major browser, including IE. That is more work for you. If you do not want to leave the web standards to the browser makers, you can take up the challenge yourself.
Probably not the best plan in the long term, though. They will continually optimize for speed, memory efficiency, rendering quality, and responsiveness. You probably will not want to put the same amount of continuous effort into it as them. You probably will not offer the same cross platform support they do.
Creating an application specific browser (ASB) with one of the standard toolkits, and then transitioning to using web browsers directly a short ways down the road is probably the way to go. No reason why you cannot work out the compatibility testing for that strategy now, since the browsers with support for it are already in public beta.
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So you want to write a standalone platform-independant application in javascript that can use opengl?
I would try making a JOGL application.
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