WhitestormJS v2 Beta: New Ecosystem

By  on  

We always improve our apps: refactor, update dependencies, practices as well as user experience. In whitestorm.js v2 we update API, app structure.

The main goal of the second version is to improve flexibility as much as we can. 3D rendering is a bit more complicated than I thought it was when used it for the first time. Now we have awesome libraries like Three.js that save you a lot of our time when you develop 3D apps for the web.

Main changes in v2

Modules

Modules are used to extend components. They can be also treated as mixins. Their main advantage is full access to a component object, they can also work with components that provide specific API (see “bridges”).

You can read more about modules in whitestorm.js in this article.

Physics

In v1 we had the ability to use 3d physics out of the box. But the more I learn from it — the more I understand that including physics in the framework was a bad idea. But I still want to make physics easily integrated.

As I said in my previous article about modules:

Modules are awesome. Modules can do anything you can do with plain THREE.Mesh, but much cleaner and flexible way.

Modules are awesome. I said that when I implemented physics as a stack of modules working with each other.

Now you can try whitestorm.js with physics right in Codepen.

See the Pen Simple WhitestormJS app with physics module by Alexander Buzin (@sasha240100) on CodePen.

React integration

This is a separate topic. The thing is that whitestorm.js components are similar to React components. My friend asked me for a wrapper that will allow usage of whs components in .jsx syntax.

I implemented react-whs.

And, sure, you can test that on Codepen.

See the Pen Simple WhitestormJS app by Alexander Buzin (@sasha240100) on CodePen.

What’s next?

Right now I am working with Exponent team to make whitestorm.js run on mobile devices using react-native.

I already have a working example on android and will publish it on GitHub soon. If you want to get more information — follow me on twitter or contact me in whitestorm.js chat in discord.

Alex Buzin

About Alex Buzin

Senior Front-end developer. Intel ISEF 2016 winner in a Software category. An author and developer of WhitestormJS framework. Hockey player. Experiencing with javascript for more than 6 years.gimp

Recent Features

  • By
    CSS Animations Between Media Queries

    CSS animations are right up there with sliced bread. CSS animations are efficient because they can be hardware accelerated, they require no JavaScript overhead, and they are composed of very little CSS code. Quite often we add CSS transforms to elements via CSS during...

  • By
    Regular Expressions for the Rest of Us

    Sooner or later you'll run across a regular expression. With their cryptic syntax, confusing documentation and massive learning curve, most developers settle for copying and pasting them from StackOverflow and hoping they work. But what if you could decode regular expressions and harness their power? In...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Assign Anchor IDs Using MooTools 1.2

    One of my favorite uses of the MooTools JavaScript library is the SmoothScroll plugin. I use it on my website, my employer's website, and on many customer websites. The best part about the plugin is that it's so easy to implement. I recently ran...

  • By
    Camera and Video Control with HTML5

    Client-side APIs on mobile and desktop devices are quickly providing the same APIs.  Of course our mobile devices got access to some of these APIs first, but those APIs are slowly making their way to the desktop.  One of those APIs is the getUserMedia API...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!