Hello,
I'm implementing a web application that is written in C++ using CGI.
Is it possible to use a 3D drawn GUI that also has animations?
Should I just include some kind of mechanism that generates animated gifs and uses an image map?
Is there another, more elegant way of doing this?
EDIT:
So it sums up to Java or Silverlight or Flash 10.
Is Flash 10 common already?
If not is Java a better choice since it's more wide spread?
I think you're missing a few key ideas.
If you want to have a 3D web-app, I don't think you're going to have much success doing it on the back-end. You'll use a ton of CPU and bandwidth rendering and sending down frames, and it will be slow and laggy (despite what some video game start-ups that will remain nameless might have you think).
Instead what you want is some client-side technology, like Flash 10 or Silverlight, which does hardware accelerated rendering on the client, using the clients CPU and GPU.
I'd recommend taking a look at the Canvas HTML tag, as well as Chrome Experiments. Those require a pretty modern browser with a very goo JavaScript implementation, but some are rather impressive.
Other options include Adobe Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight.
First: from some of your comments, it appears you're not planning to actually use your web application in a browser. If I'm wrong, see below. If I'm right, then you're perfectly fine to write whatever UI you want using whatever technology you want and connect to your web application via that UI program. There are issues you'll have to deal with: what platform, what technology, etc. But you'll have no problems connecting to your web application using such a UI; just follow the HTTP protocols in your socket programming or use a framework that does it for you.
That said, if you're planning to do 3d in-browser, you should look into the Google O3D API. It's a browser plugin, but it should give you everything you need to do 3d in-browser using the GPU rather than software rendering like Flash and Silverlight do.
If you're not willing to use a browser plugin and you're not trying to do your own UI program, then your only other option is to use Canvas and Chrome Experiments as @Kitsune has suggested.
Hi,
I'm having the same problem: I need to display 3D models inside a web frontend (CGI).
Currently Flash seems to be the best solution - nearly all browsers support flash (including many mobile devices) and there's a big variety of tools and sdks for Flash - see: http://osflash.org/projects
So I would try to develop a CGI app, which generates a flash animation and delivers it via http.
Would be interesting, if you have found a solution / way to realize it - currently I don't have the time for it :(
ciao, Chris
PS: Adobe has the Flex-3 SDK as OpenSource - which can be used for commercial applications.