WWT-Web - WorldWide Telescope

This repository contains the HTML5 SDK which is the rendering engine for the web client and the embeddable web control. It also contains the full web client code. This repository does not contain all the server-side endpoints needed to render tiles, constellation lines, etc. Some samples will be included in the future.

Prerequisites

• Visual Studio 2013 (Free Community Edition)
• NodeJs - Only needed if you want to compile the sdk into javascript or run the minified web client js code.

Included Projects

There are two solutions in the repository. The standalone webclient sln includes only the webclient implementation of the Html5sdk. The Html5sdk contains a sln which loads both the html5sdk AND the webclient. Opening the html5sdk sln enables you to compile the c# files into javascript, then run the webclient locally using the modified js output.

Getting Started

• Decide which .sln you want to run (see above) and open in Visual Studio 2013 or higher.
• Right-click webclient\default.aspx and point to View In Browser

To Enable grunt (LESS compilation, HTML5SDK Compilation, and JS Minification)

• In a command prompt, navigate to the webclient root and type npm install to install grunt's dependencies. If you encounter any errors (I always do on a clean machine), ensure %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\npm exists (create it if not) and your system path includes ;%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\npm. You can run the ensurenpm.cmd to solve this.
• Once you have installed the node_modules (via npm install above), install the grunt client. type npm install -g grunt-cli from the same command prompt.
• If you do not have bower installed, run npm install -g bower
• Run npm install to install dependencies
• Run grunt watch from the same command prompt.
• In a new command window run grunt bower:install to get the libraries the web client depends on (jquery, angular, bootstrap, etc.). You should see the watcher window detect the dependent libraries and run the 'vendor' grunt task
• Disable any LESS compilers you might be using as visual studio extensions. Grunt watch will do everything for you.

Once you have completed the above you are set to make your own modifications to the code and your LESS and JS will be compiled/uglified. You can view the webclient by right-clicking webclient\default.aspx > view in browser.

To make changes to the HTML5 SDK, simply compile the html5sdk project (named wwtlib) while the grunt watch thread is active. Grunt will take the js output and create the wwtsdk.js file. To use this file instead of the production file, add ?debug=local to the query string.

Web client dependencies - further reading

AngularJS

If you are not familiar with Angular JS, I recommend taking some time to learn angularjs as this is a very heavy angular app.

Bootstrap

We also use the bootstrap library and compile our own less with the bootstrap less lib. We use their dropdowns, popovers, and modals quite a bit.

Angular-strap

We use the angular-strap directives library to integrate bootstrap components into angular.

ScriptSharp

We use ScriptSharp to compile the c# classes into javascript. We recently upgraded to ScriptSharp v0.8