Re: [openvrml-develop] Building OpenVRML on OpenSuSE 10.2

[Braden M. <br...@en...>]

On Thu, 2007-10-11 at 17:00 +0200, Gino van den Bergen wrote:
> I'm trying to build OpenVRML 0.16.6 under OpenSuSE 10.2. My problem is 
> that the configure script fails with the following message:
> 
> configure: error: SpiderMonkey is required for Script node JavaScript 
> support.
> 
> Obviously I need to install the Mozilla JS engine, however I do not seem 
> to be able to find it in the otherwise very complete OpenSuSE 10.2 
> distribution.

Googling a bit, mozilla-xulrunner181-devel looks like it's probably what
you need.

Unfortunately, OpenVRML 0.16.6's configure doesn't know about the
xulrunner* variants of the pkg-config files. And while you could
override JS_CFLAGS and JS_LIBS, configure still tries to use pkg-config
with the metadata file in order to establish the directory that should
be used in the rpath flag. Unfortunately I didn't have the foresight to
make GRE_PATH an AC_ARG_VAR. :-/

Would you be able to test a patch?

>  I've tried to build SpiderMonkey from source however the 
> makefile fails on the install.  Rather than waste another day on trying 
> to fix this I would like  to ask you guys whether it is possible to 
> create a config flag for disabling the use of JavaScript an simply  fix 
> the configure script.

That flag already exists: --disable-script-node-javascript.

And, BTW, if you were able to build the stand-alone SpiderMonkey
distribution --with-libjs will make OpenVRML's configure look for it
instead of the libmozjs version that gets included with Firefox,
XULrunner, etc.

>  I need OpenVRML for loading  wrl files and I do 
> not need to build a full-fledged VRML browser, so I probably can live 
> without  script nodes. Alternatively, perhaps the OpenVRML team could 
> include the latest SpiderMonkey source in the OpenVRML  distribution. 
> This would certainly  save a lot of people from the hassle  of mucking 
> about with getting the proper  libs at the proper place.

Not gonna happen. Tracking 3rd-party sources is no fun, so I do it as
little as possible.

> Also, I would like to use my own renderer and need to translate the 
> internal representation from OpenVRML to my own. Are there any examples 
> of how this can be done?

There are a couple of ways to skin the cat. The most straightforward way
would be to implement your own viewer. In that case, the existing OpenGL
renderer (openvrml::gl::viewer) should be a pretty good example.

The other way would be to use openvrml::node_traverser to get the data
from nodes and do whatever you want with it. You should be able to find
some examples of node_traverser uses in the libopenvrml source.

The viewer approach should be faster, but less flexible.

-- 
Braden McDaniel                           e-mail: <br...@en...>
<http://endoframe.com>                    Jabber: <br...@ja...>