6. The External Authoring Interface

Under construction, the whole thing is rather rough draft like, though the examples will work with several kinds of browsers.

NOTE: IMPORTANT, on May 2000 I taught some EAI to our students again (after letting sit this topic for 2 years). I fixed a few EAI examples in here, e.g. upgraded from Java 1.0 to Java 1.1. THIS documentation does NOT reflect these changes (nor does the PostScript file). Look at dates on files to figure out which files have been changed.

Hopefully I'll fix this sometimes. Old examples can be found in the parallel eai-old directory.

Examples for this chapter (and others) can be found here: http://tecfa.unige.ch/guides/vrml/examples/eai/ However, other examples in this tree (not used in this manual) might be broken sometimes.

This section assumes that you are a little bit familiar with Java programming. However, since our students learn JAVA with VRML we also discuss how to do certain things with Java. See section 8.5 on page for a few comments about Java and setting up your environment.

Oh do you want to know, why I picked up EAI programming before doing more complicated other VRML stuff. Well we bought an SGI O2 machine for doing VRML. Since SGI does not support the Java Script node for their own hardware, nor all those fine JavaScript examples featured on their site, there was only the EAI left to play with. Fortunately the EAI is a very fine thing for a number of applications. So I am very angry at SGI for not supporting their own hardware (and will not replace my old Sun by an O2 but by an Ultra 5). But I am grateful to the SGI folks who did produce the EAI. I hope that some of them must whine too at Cosmo's ``management'' decisions. (That is on Jan 98).