Doing solid modeling in Web browsers

(A tip of the hat to Josh Mings of SolidSmack for uncovering this item yesterday.)

Benjamin Nortier figured out how to make a solid modeler work in nearly any Web browser. Read about it on his blog here. In brief, the three components are as follows:

• An HTML5 WebGL-enabled browser running scene graph library (SceneJS) for rendering the models, and Javascript for the UI. Only geometry operations are sent to the RESTful API running on a server. His video shows Google's Chrome browser.

• The RESTful service running in an Erlang VM. It handles geometric modeling requests,  tesselates e models for rendering, and generates meshes for STL export.

• OpenCASCADE open source solid modeler handles mathematical representations of the solid geometry.

A video on this blog page shows him creating a gear in his browser-based modeler, and then 3D printing it.

In the comments section, Tony Buser notes that CloudSCAD is similar.