The 3D Web Coder

Team Meeting and Deploy to Heroku Button

I am in London for an internal meeting with my European ADN DevTech colleagues today. As you might guess from the pictures, we are in Broad Court, right next to Bow Street and beside the nice bronze statue Young Dancer by Enzo Plazotta. During the meeting, Cyrille mentioned the possibility to add a 'deploy to Heroku' button to a GitHub repository readme to automate the installation and testing a cloud-based app. I use Heroku to run all my cloud-based apps, so I decided to test that right away... Read more →

CompHound Heroku Deployment, Urban Farming

Yesterday, I discussed the CompHound datatable implementation. Today, let's deploy to Heroku for you to try it out right away – Cloud9 – Easy github.io domain rerouting – CompHound deployment to Heroku – Heroku requires HTTPS – Recent CompHound commits – Try it out live – CompHound road map – Self-sufficient urban farming on 1/10 of an acre... Read more →

Live Web Site Render Markdown via Showdown

Theo Armour uses Showdown to convert Markdown to HTML in all his JavaScript apps. Each page generates its own HTML from the embedded MD and there is no need more for any external intermediate conversion steps. Theo later demonstrated a method to implement an entire web site written in markdown and updated live through GitHub pages. Read more →

Adding GCal Entries Using Google Calendar API

Today I complete my discussion of a Python script using the Google Calendar API to parse events from a text-based desktop calendar file and push them to the cloud for global access. Google OAuth credential handling. Date and time parsing and formatting. Adding a calendar event. Mainline. GitHub pages. GitHub repository. Google OAuth Credential Handling Pretty interesting system... The following code snippets take you to a login page in your browser, prompting you to identify yourself manually in the user... Read more →

FireRatingCloud Heroku + Mongolab Deployed

Fully and completely deploying the FireRatingCloud support database on the cloud was much easier than expected. Please refer to the fireratingdb node.js web server and FireRatingCloud Revit add-in GitHub repositories for an overview of the exploration and project evolution. I already moved the database off-site to the mongolab host yesterday, but I still had the node web server running locally. To do so, I created a new Heroku app and linked it to the existing fireratingdb GitHub repo. I asked... Read more →

WebGL Workshop, Jobs, Anchors and Functional JavaScript

I returned happily from the successful fourth and last day of the Milano WebGL workshop, which we concluded with a group session guiding through the View and Data API tutorial. Here is a short report on that and a few other current topics: WebGL workshop report Working at Autodesk Resolving the link offset error caused by the Snap responsive design menu bar Functional JavaScript workshop I took a break in the middle of the train trip from Milano back home... Read more →

Node.js REST API Enhancement and VR Party

Let's get back to looking at node.js, a REST API implementation, and a recent San Francisco virtual reality hackathon project: Node.js REST API enhancement Top ten nodejs mistakes Kean's VR party Node.js REST API enhancement My colleagues Cyrille and Philippe were not very impressed with one aspect of my previous node WebGL viewer server REST API implementation. Both suggested that each API module implement and export its own router instead of just defining and exporting individual functions. The main reason... Read more →

Journey to the Cloud – Development Team Transitioning

Today, let me pass on to you some observations on how to transition a desktop oriented development team to the cloud. Today is Ascension Day and a holiday in Neuchâtel, giving me a bit of time to clear some of my todo list items, and this article was one of them. Before getting to that, I'll just briefly mention that I returned safe and sound from the Dubai hackathon and have been pretty busy with Revit stuff since, e.g., how... Read more →

Radical Node Server View and Heroku Push Cleanup

Two days ago, I implemented an enhancement to the node server REST API of my WebGL viewer and its interactive testing framework suggested by my colleague Cyrille Fauvel. He also suggested applying a whole host of other best practices to separate content, styles and logic. I am quite impressed that I succeeded in breaking so many rules implementing such a small project. I am very happy and find it extremely important to get them corrected early on. Many thanks to... Read more →

Node Server Rendering with either Swig or Handlebars

My previous step towards implementing a minimal WebGL viewer node server showed how to render 3D geometric POST data using Swig. Due to various self-created difficulties, I switched the rendering engine to Swig after struggling with initial attempts using Express Handlebars. Now that those difficulties have been solved, I thought I would show how to switch back to the handlebars support and prove that I use either one. They cannot be used in parallel, though, since the rendering engine is... Read more →

WebGL Node Server with GitHub and Heroku Repo Sync

Yesterday, I discussed a proof of concept for a simple desktop driven 3D geometry WebGL viewer. I want to enhance it in a number of ways: Reimplement it as a Heroku-hosted node.js web server Provide the geometrical data to display through query string input arguments Remove the scaling to the -1 to 1 2-unit box Support integer arguments for the geometry definition Add support to define rendering colours Let's start at the top of the list and host the 3D... Read more →

WebGL 101 – Getting Started

In our progression towards a full-fledged model design app, we completed the following steps so far: Retrieving and Processing Query Strings in JavaScript and a Node.js Server Hosting a Node Server on Heroku A Program Generator Node.js Web Server Displaying 2D Graphics via a Node Server Driving the SVG Node Server from a Desktop Application After the quick and efficient little excursion into 2D graphics using SVG, let's head straight on towards 3D... WebGL Nowadays, the simplest and most ubiquitous... Read more →

Hosting a Node Server on Heroku, Pages and 3D Web

Lots of topics lined up for today! The real meat that we are hungering for is hosting and running our node app live on the web. There's much more, though: Hosting The 3D Web Coder source HTML and index on GitHub pages A much cooler GitHub pages sample The 3D web is happening here and now The Milan WebGL Workshop Hosting a node server on Heroku Testing a node server live on this page Hosting The 3D Web Coder Source... Read more →