Server side backup

Question

Is there a way for a server without a header (stand-alone server, Amazon AWS or similar) to run the server on the server side?)

I am currently returning to rendering the canvas (the framework is for performance reasons only) when the user's browser does not support WebGL. This is good enough for real-time interaction, but in order for the application to make sense, users really would need to somehow see a properly designed version with backlighting, shadows, post-processing, etc., Even if it comes with a large delayed.

So ... is it possible to create a server service with a functional instance of three.js? The client will still use canvas tree.js framework rendering, but after I say ... a second of inactivity, it will request through AJAX the full render from the server service and apply it simply as an image.

Are there currently any applications, libraries, or anything that would allow such a thing (functional javascript + webgl + three.js on a headless, preferably a Linux server and without a GPU)?

PhantomJS comes to mind, but apparently it does not yet support WebGL: http://code.google.com/p/phantomjs/issues/detail?id=273

Or any alternative approaches to the problem? Walking the route of programmatically managing a full desktop computer using a GPU and a standard instance of chrome / firefox seems possible, albeit fragile, and I really don't want to go there if there are any software solutions.

Answer 1

In its QA infrastructure, Google can run Chromium testing using Mesa (see question 97675 via the switch --use-gl=osmesa ). The software rasterizer in the latest version of Mesa is quite advanced, using LLVM to convert shaders and emulate execution on the CPU. Your first adventure would be to create Mesa, build Chrome, and then try to tie them together.

As an additional note, this is also what I plan (in the near future) for PhantomJS itself, in particular, since Qt is also moving in this direction, that is, it uses Mesa / LLVMpipe instead of its own raster engine. The rooms really look good. Even better, for stand-alone, non-animated capture with one shot, performance will be more than satisfactory.

Answer 2

Some entries in this thread: https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/issues/2182

In particular, this demo shows how to generate some server-side images using nodejs.

Thanks Nico

Answer 3

The links below will not help solve your problem using AWS, but they will give you a hint.

I am working on an application with a similar architecture and have come across these examples:

Multiplayer game with realtime socket.io

My original question is about similar architecture.