Sencha Labs has announced the availability of a new open source framework for WebGL development. The framework, which is called PhiloGL, makes it easier for developers to adopt WebGL and integrate its functionality in Web applications. The framework is distributed under the permissive MIT license.

WebGL is an emerging standard that allows developers to seamlessly integrate 3D content in Web pages. It was designed to expose the low-level OpenGL ES 2.0 APIs through JavaScript bindings that operate on the HTML Canvas element. The standard provides an enormous amount of flexibility and allows Web developers to create virtually anything that can be expressed with 3D graphics. The downside is that the lack of abstraction vastly increases the complexity of building 3D-enabled Web applications.

When the WebGL standard was devised, Mozilla and other proponents contended that the technical complexity would be ameliorated by third-party frameworks—developers could build and share their own task-specific abstraction layers as libraries that wrap the low-level APIs. One of the first examples was the Canvas 3D JavaScript Library (C3DL), a framework that was originally created by a Mozilla developer and is currently maintained by a team at Seneca College.

Sencha's PhiloGL is one of the first independent libraries for WebGL development. It offers high-level features that are useful for constructing real-world WebGL applications. Sencha created several demos to illustrate the framework's suitability for creating interactive 3D visualizations, such as this 3D view of global temperature changes.

The framework is available for download from the project's website or GitHub-hosted code repository. Complete API documentation can also be found online.