Web3D Working Group meetings at SIGGRAPH 2012 8 3 AM Minutes

Minutes of meeting held 3 August 2012 8 AM PDT

Attendees

People interested in the CAD Working Group are asked to refresh their entries on the X3D CAD People page where we summarize our interests.

See Web3D Birds of a Feather Agenda for CAD_BoF_2012
- Can we get Peter Schickel or someone from Bit Management discuss new BS Contact Browser?
- Players supporting CAD can be found on the Player support for X3D components page. Players reporting support are BS Contact, Instant Player, Octaga VS, Swirl, and Xj3d. Can we help OpenVRML and view3dscene go from partial to full support?
X3DOM support does not appear to include CAD Geometry. X3DOM is open source and some ambitious person may be able to implement the Javascript addition to X3DOM to support CAD nodes.
- Tools that don't fully support CAD Geometry (FreeWRL, H3DView, OpenVRML, view3dscene) may use the CAD Prototypes implementation or other open source - these nodes are pretty easy to implement.
- Issue for future discussion: Is there a difference in how feasible it is to implement the proposed changes to X3DPart/X3DFace nodes in Prototypes among the 3 options we have recently discussed [2]?

Xj3d Site [3] is back up, after a 10 day down period; includes web access to subversion repository
- Alan reports that everything is now paid through May
- a number of changes were received that seem to build OK.
We discussed next steps for Xj3d source
- Steps a-d (restoration of site for next 2 months) have been accomplished -- Thanks to Alan Hudson!
- Option e, moving Subversion repository to SourceForge will be straightforward -- use subversion archive file to move to a new Subversion server.
- Option f, converting to git version control, and moving to GitHub, will require some careful consideration. It can be a steep learning curve for developers to transition from subversion to git. Conversion from a subversion repository to git can be automated, but it will be difficult to go back to subversion from git.
Future tasks
- Terry and Vince will finish integration of Vince's NURBS improvements into the Xj3D branch, then once ready integrate into the trunk
- Don and Mike Bailey NPS will update X3D-Edit to include new NURBS support
- Vince and Don will test each of the NURBS Examples in detail, improving scenes/X3D-Edit/Xj3D as appropriate. Possibly some specification refinements might also result from this testing.

jgeom library: The jgeom.net Java library was developed by Sam Gerber and is used in the implementation of the NURBS component for the Xj3D browser. It was originally licensed under the GPL license, and this posed difficulties in distributing this library with Xj3d -- the GPL license is viral and incompatible with the other licensing used in Xj3D.
Sam Gerber has agreed to allow us to distribute the jgeom library and source code under the LGPL (Lesser GPL) license. His permission to relicense jgeom on SourceForge is a great assist to Xj3D development.
A jgeom project has been created on SourceForge site, it is currently visible only to developers but will be published and publicly visible once we get the initial codebase uploaded
Vince will upload the code -- expect this to be accomplished by Aug 6.
We will establish a build.xml file of ant tasks to perform compilation, tests etc.
We will also create jgeom.jar for replacement of the .jar already deployed in the Xj3D lib/ directory.
If someone needs to be a developer of this project, please contact Vince or Don with your SourceForge account name for addition
Alan is checking whether there is a dependency on the previous jgeom-core.jar already in the codebase...

We looked at X3D CAD scenes and NURBS scenes in the X3D Basic Examples Archive
For archive clarity and consistency, it is important for file names to match our suggested X3D Naming Conventions and meta Tag Conventions
Looked at the example files submitted to support our work on Mantis Ticket 528, the extension to the CAD nodes allowing CADFaces to be independently positioned. The files currently named "Test CAD Transform (A|B|C)" will be removed from "Examples" archives as they are not valid X3D, but will be be archived with better documentation in the naming and metatags. Examples have been renamed to CADPartChildTransformationAlternative{A|B|C}, which are not valid, and CADPartChildNoTransformation, which is valid. TODO: Add links on the Mantis Bug Tracker Ticket 528 back to this example.