9webdraw

9webdraw is a Web draw(3) server for Plan 9, using the HTML5 canvas element. This will allow anyone with a fully featured web browser to connect to your server and have something that resembles a draw terminal.

NOTE: This is highly experimental and may not work very well at this stage.

Roadmap:

• Make it work for most built-in applications and rio
• Stabilize
• Enhance performance
• Add some form of authentication (probably just basic)
• Create a file transfer (in and out) part of the filesystem
• Add fullscreen mode
• Add sound
• Create a protocol for rendering 3D graphics and video
• Create a mobile-centric environment

Prerequisites

• Plan 9 ( or 9 Front ), of course!
• The Weebsocket 9P-over-WebSocket bridge.
  • Included in 9atom
• A modern web browser supporting:
  • Binary-mode WebSockets
  • HTML5 Canvas
  • Pointer Lock

Building

% mk install

will install the web application to /usr/web/9wd/.

Note that on 9front you may need to copy latin1.h from the bell labs distribution to your /sys/src/9/port so that it will compile.

Running

% ip/httpd/httpd -w /usr/web/9wd

Then connect with your web browser to http://servername/9wd/9wd.html If you are running in a VM you may need to forward the port 80 to something you can connect.

Using

By default, the weebsocket server will run acme, which mostly works. You can try running rio by recompiling weebsocket to launch it instead. Note that rio is not currently working very well.

You can use the usual gestures within the canvas. Lock your cursor into the canvas by double-clicking on it. The scroll wheel sends the scroll events.

Debugging

Debugging is accomplished using the web browser developer console (ctrl-shift-i). Note that each /dev/draw operation is logged there along with links to the DOM canvas objects. The canvas objects are mostly hidden using a style at the top of the HTML. You can modify display: none; to display: block; so you can see the images and the changes made to them at the bottom of the page.