Grammar

As I am getting into the more advanced aspects of WebGL, a major challenge is becoming apparent. Sharers (programs that draw things) can not be recursive.... while fractals are, by definition, recursive. To overcome this, I am going to have to implement an iterative drawing mechanism in WebGL (while I could recursively generate the fractal in JavaScript, the result would not be nearly as fast. Besides shaders being optimal for this type of computation, recursive approaches are almost always slower since they require complex memory management.) I am digging through the following resources as I try to write an algorithm to generate a fractal recursively:

• Fractalturtle
• The Koch Curve Via Grammar Re-Writing

As a bonus, I am learning grammar rules (not the punctuation, spelling kind.) A very important and powerful concept in Computer Science, I am unfamiliar with the technical implementations and terminology of grammar rules... although that is quickly changing!

Back to research,

Istvan.

SAFE, WebGL

The first hurdle in building the website that will become the home of my project is building the underlying framework. I am working with the brand new, un-released, SAFE (Safe Activation Framework for Extensibility) framework. Using SAFE I can develop applications one at a time and publish them as part of the larger site.

In addition to publishing individual applications via the framework, I need to create and host libraries on which the applications are build. For example, many of the applications will run on WebGL (a language with which I am familiarizing myself as part of this project). I have spent the last several days reading through these tutorials to learn about WebGL and how to build it into my framework.

Progress is off to a great start,
Istvan.