A recent post on the Google Code Blog alerted me to something cool. Khronos, a software company focused heavily on graphics, has released a statement saying that they plan on developing open-source 3D graphics libraries for JavaScript.
This is awesome… assuming they do things correctly.
Looking at their website briefly, I have few doubts that Khronos should succeed in releasing a powerful JS graphics framework. I don’t know all that much about graphics, but I’ve spend enough time coding OpenGL (in C++) to know that a JavaScript framework would be very useful.
Since most of the latest cutting-edge web applications already use JavaScript (ever hear of AJAX?), creating visually engaging media content in JavaScript would allow developers to seriously compete with other frameworks like Flash/Silverlight/JavaFX. The data integration for such applications would be simple since they’d be using the same programming language, plus developers could truly be platform-independant.
Can you even begin to imagine the money companies could save by not buying Expression Blend (for Silverlight) or the Adobe Flash Suite (for Flash).
Kudos to you Khronos… just don’t screw this up!