Vocabulary - General
Babylon
Babylon.js is the WebGL based web 3D-engine used by us for displaying Models on the web. It is open source and you will find documentation on https://www.babylonjs.com/.
Pointer Events
Babylon.js uses Pointer Events for mouse and touch interaction, which not all devices and browsers support. Specifically, Apple iOS 12 and earlier does not support it. You can use a Pointer Events polyfill to improve compatibility. Babylon recommends using PEP from jquery for this.
React
React is our preferred front-end framework. It is widely used and well documented. You will find documentation on https://reactjs.org/ .
SDK
Software Development Kit. This is the code we have written for you. It can be used as a reference for how to do your own implementation towards the API, or its components can be used to greatly reduce the amount of code you need to write yourself. We recommend you use as much of the SDK as possible. Not only does it simplify the integration process, it also helps to guarantee that the API is access in the manner we intended it to.
Stage Embedded
Stage Embedded is what makes it possible to embed Stage on the web by simply inserting a short snippet of code. It works much the same as when embedding a Tweet or a YouTube-video.
Stage Embedded is more limited in what can be done and customized compared to a normal, full, integration but can be very useful when the full power of Stage is not needed.
Three
- Legacy - three.js is the WebGL based web 3D-engine that used to be used by us for displaying Models on the web. We have migrated to Babylon.
Underscore
An underscore (_) when used in our SDK usually denoted one of the following:
- An unused function parameter kept around to make it easier to understand what parameters could be used in the function.
- Something semi-private. A function or a class or a field that we can not for technical reasons mark as private, but is not considered part of the public SDK. Try not to use these unless you have to. If you have any doubt whether or not you need to use one of these, please ask us.
WebAssembly
Synonyms: WASM
Until recently all code run in the web browser had to have been written in JavaScript, or transpiled into JavaScript from some other language. WebAssembly is a binary instruction format that can run in the web browser. We use it because of its great performance and it allowing us to programming in a language of our choice (Rust). It is also supported in all major modern browsers.
For the most part you will not notice parts of the code being WebAssembly, but as it might have impact on what platforms the code run on, we wanted to make you aware.