WebGL: Up and Running

Afterword

So, where do we go from here? We’ve seen what it takes to build a WebGL application. It’s not the easiest thing in the world, but now that we’ve been through it, I think you would agree that it’s not rocket science either. Sure, there are some new concepts—even a few downright foreign ideas in there—but nothing we can’t tackle with a little practice.

By now I hope you can imagine developing a production site with WebGL and how it will fit into your infrastructure, as well as how to tune it to meet your own needs. This book covered several topics you will inevitably touch upon in your projects—WebGL API concepts, 3D graphics programming, the Three.js toolkit, and content creation, to name a few—but these are just the tip of a deep iceberg. The feature set is so powerful, and the possibilities so vast, that there is still much to learn on the road ahead.

WebGL has moved from the infant stage into toddlerhood; it has a lot of growing up to do, but we can clearly see outlines of the adult that it will one day become. The standard is well thought out and thoroughly vetted, but the ink is only just dry; the first browsers shipped with the final version 1 specification just over a year ago. In my experience, the implementations have been rock-solid. I tested the examples in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari; they all looked great and performed well, and most importantly, they worked identically across the browsers. The tools are still mishmash and need a lot of work, but they will get ...