Plugins API for X3DOM

[YuanxiangFranck]

During my internship, I worked on the creation of x3dom-based tools
for mesh data visualization and analysis. I wanted to create new DOM
nodes that integrate nicely in a standard x3dom tree, namely
iso-color, threshold, clip-plane.

I had two goals in mind:

1. create an x3dom plugin API that allows one to create new DOM nodes
   which extend x3dom functionality;
2. keep a simple x3dom-like interface for the final users.

In this branch I created a new node : CustomAttributeNode. This node
serve as entry point in x3dom to use the API.

For a detailed technical explanation of the API take a look at the GitHub
repository of
my demonstration.

Example of the API:

Following example illustrates the usage of such plugins. The relevant
markup looks like:

<TriangleSet>
  <Coordinate point="..."> </Coordinate>
  <Normal vector="..."> </Normal>
  <Threshold
     upperBound="1" lowerBound="0" dataName="triSetData" > </Threshold>
  <IsoColor
     max="1" min="0" dataName="triSetData" > </IsoColor>
  <FloatVertexAttribute
     name="triSetData" numComponents="1" value="..."> </FloatVertexAttribute>
  <FloatVertexAttribute
     name="other_set_of_data" numComponents="1" value="..."> </FloatVertexAttribute>
  ...
</TriangleSet>

The Threshold and IsoColor nodes work like any x3dom node:
they react to any attribute change using DOM's node setAttribute
method. This makes it easy to use HTML widgets like sliders / buttons
to drive the plugin's parameters.

Example and live demonstration on:
http://yuanxiangfranck.github.io/x3dom-plugins-API/