Re: OpenGL rendering surface for CGI apps through PicoGUI

On Sun, Jan 19, 2003 at 09:49:02AM -0500, Jeff Kowalczyk wrote:
> I've always been looking for an efficient and easy-to-use way to do hardware accelerated
> OpenGL charts or other renderings from a server-side application server (like PHP or
> Zope). Since PicoGUI is compulsively adding all these great undreamed-of features, and it
> apparently has OpenGL baked in already, could an API be set up for this purpose?
> 
> Optimal would be an interface accessible to scripting languages like Python or PHP, or
> even a direct FastCGI interface. Requests would be some bundled form of OpenGL comands.
> PicoGUI would have some mechanism for queing requests and drawing them as quickly as
> possible using the hardware, then returning a raw bitmap to the calling application on
> stdout or some other mechanism like a callback. If it worked, most practical single-frame
> renderings would take no longer than a fraction of a second to render on modern 3D
> hardware. Later on, plugins in a fast language like C could be added to do configurable
> PNG or JPEG compression instead of passing back the raw bitmap.
> 
> Just an idea, it would be another thing PicoGUI could do that nobody else was doing.
> 

This would be neat, but I don't see how PicoGUI could help with it. PicoGUI does support
OpenGL, but if you only want to do OpenGL drawing and don't need UI widgets there's no
point. It sounds like you just need an offscreen hardware accelerated OpenGL implementation.
I don't think such an implementation exists on linux, since all hardware acceleration is
hopeless intertwangled with XFree86.

On a similar note, I have thought of using PicoGUI to generate web sites. The web site would
be a picogui theme and application, probably using widget templates. There would be a video
driver that converts picogui's layout tree to HTML. The user's actions would be encoded
in the URL, and the pages would be cached.

The biggest problems I've seen with this are:
  - I don't know enough about CSS to know how practical converting picogui themes to CSS is
  - The action encoding would have to detect cycles in the page navigation, so they don't
    get infinitely long.
  - The web application would need a way to save and restore its state very quickly
  - It's just plain weird :)

> 
> 
> 
> 
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