LumaGL: A JavaScript WebGL Framework for Data Visualization

Overview

LumaGL's primary focus is to provide a set of efficient and easy-to-use WebGL building blocks enabling high-performance browser-based data visualizations.

See Examples and Documentation.

Note LumaGL has just been made public. Documentation is still in the process of being updated to correspond with the latest API changes.

LumaGL Design Goals

Focused on data visualization. While generic in nature, LumaGL will prioritize features that enable efficient rendering of large sets of data or that support improved visualization techniques.
Modular: a set of small collaborating classes that can used together with components from other frameworks (e.g. stackgl).
No "magic" global state. All components work with a standard WebGLRenderingContext.
A modern, compact codebase leveraging the latest JavaScript standards (ES6+)
Use modern JavaScript build technologies (browserify/babel/npm etc).

History

LumaGL started as a fork of PhiloGL (https://github.com/philogb/philogl) however no effort has been made to maintain compatibility with PhiloGL-based applications.

Installation

npm install luma.gl --save

Documentation, Lessons and Examples

Luma.gl comes with 16 lessons, a number of examples, and a full set of reference documenation.

To run examples:

git clone git@github.com:uber/luma.gl.git
cd luma.gl
npm install
npm start

This builds the LumaGL bundle, starts a small local server, and opens a browser window on a welcome page, allowing you to run to all lessons and examples.

Quickstart

The following code sample illustrates the "flavor" of the LumaGL API.

import {createGLContext, Program, Buffer, PerspectiveCamera} from 'luma.gl';

// Initialize WebGL context
const canvas = document.getElementById('lesson01-canvas');

const gl = createGLContext(canvas, {initialize: true});
const camera = new PerspectiveCamera({aspect: canvas.width/canvas.height});

const program = Program.fromDefaultShaders(gl);
program.use();
program.setBuffer(new Buffer(gl, {
  attribute: 'aVertexPosition',
  data: new Float32Array([0, 1, 0, -1, -1, 0, 1, -1, 0]),
  size: 3
}));

camera.view.$translate(-1.5, 0, -7);
program.setUniform('uMVMatrix', camera.view);
program.setUniform('uPMatrix', camera.projection);

// Draw Triangle
gl.clear(gl.COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | gl.DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT);
gl.drawArrays(gl.TRIANGLES, 0, 3);

Developing

Master Dev

Use npm start to run the test server, it will start a watch and automatically update when you save modified source files.

Publishing

Before publishing run

npm run prepublish

to generate the static bundles, the optional pretranspiled ES5 distribution, and the documention.

Building Documentation

To run the static site generation, you need to install the jekyll and pygments ruby gems which can be done with the following command:

gem install jekyll pygments.rb

Once that's done, you can rebuild the static site using the following npm script:

npm run build-docs

This will create a folder called _site in the root directory which contains all the static content for the site. To view the docs locally, you can also run jekyll as a standalone server with the command:

jekyll serve --source=docs/

npm run open-docs

stevenbeeckman / luma.gl