Well it has been a while since the last update but nevertheless we’ve been very productive since then. We are struggling a bit on updating the current Renesis Version as we have been fully focused on V3. The good news is that V3 has really become some shape and it already does some really cool stuff like multiple pages as of SVG 1.2. We’ve also built the RENESIS Reader which works similiar to Adobe’s Reader and let’s you fully use the power of SVG files as if you’d been using PDF files except that you get the full suite of tools from SVG. At this point, we are currently working on getting Multi-Threaded Rendering running, improving the Hardware-Acceleration backend as well as trying hard to include full COM-Support. Besides we’ve also made some first successfull steps to integrate Google’s V8 Engine and should soon see a good speed improvement in dynamic SVG. Some work on SMIL has also started. Sure enough however, you really want to know a release date, right? 
Well, we are planning on getting an alpha out as soon as we’ve managed to get basic scripting working, hopefully not later than by begin of march.
As of today, we have been able to hire five additional developers that will spend all their time on developing Renesis V3. This is great news as we’ve been searching and evaluating a lot of candidates during the past couple of weeks and months and had have a hard time finding the right people. The new resources will seriously speed up our development time on Renesis V3 whcih will result in an earlier release within our labs as planned so far. This will also affect the development time we can spend on Rave, the SVG Authoring Tool so that we might be able to deliver an early alpha version already by january / february next year.
November 18th, 2008 in
examotion |
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Well it’s time for another post. We have successfully finished the new Platform Framework for Renesis V3. It is also capable of correct handling the integration into the Internet Explorer. Our current work is based on developing Renaissance. This is a OpenVG-compatible implementation for rendering 2d vector graphics. Renaissance can either render per software emulation using efficient processor mechanism or per OpenGL / OpenGL ES for embedded hardware devices. Renesis V3 will be based on Renaissance however Renaissance will also become a separate product from examotion. Renesis V3 uses dynamic loading that is, you can easily push other OpenVG Implementations without requiring a different version of Renesis. This let’s you easily customize Renesis V3 for different systems and devices.
Oh and as we are already it, Renesis V3 will also include partial support for 3D Rendering. We’re still trying to figure whether to use X3D or whether to do some custom implementation that can be steered by using Javascript.
Well, it might the be time to talk more details on Renesis V3. We are currently working on getting an alpha out within our labs by december 2008 however no promises yet but we’ll do better :-). Renesis V3 is a complete rewrite as stated already and is focused on supporting SVG 1.2 Mobile then going “back” to SVG 1.1 full. Now where are we at this point?
We have successfully finished the Core which does all that “usable stuff” like we’ve implemented our own Unicode handling utilities. Sure enough we could for example use ICU but it’s just too big and this time we’ve decided to avoid any 3rd-party libraries completely but instead write everything on our own except on the script engine front (but more to come on that in the next chapter). We’ve also finished that whole XML stuff which includes parsing, serializing, building trees and such things. Now our focus is currently on the platform stuff which close to be finished (70%) and then we’ll go on with the rendering engine which by itself will be completely based on OpenVG. We will also build our own OpenVG implementation based on the rendering engine of the Renesis V2 as it has proven to be very fast and not every computer has the hardware required for using OpenVG efficiently saying that our software renderer does much better on most systems according to perfomance and especially quality.
On parallel to the Platform Stuff, another team is currently working on our Model-Layer. Before V3 we’ve always implemented each DOM Class (and there’re very many, there’s uDOM, DOM3 Core/Events/Views, CSS DOM and much more) by hand which has proven to be very inefficient. Inefficient in the way of not having the full control when something changes, difficulties in implementing wrappers and heavy depencies resulting in slow perfomance and much overhead. This time we are building an abstraction layer which can automatically (re-)generate our whole object model from given IDLs yet keeping existing code untouched. In the same process, our model generator is also capable of generating any kind of wrappers on the fly saving hundred of hours of work. At this point we are figuring to implement Google’s V8 Engine and COM (JScript) from Microsoft. To be able to use Google’s V8 Engine we do also need to extend it heavily to support COM Objects as otherwise we couldn’t communicate with the Internet Explorer when running as a plugin.
Well as promised, we’ll keep you updated on about what’s going on within examotion and so here it goes - hot stuff directly coming from our labours. Before diving into too much details, let me first explain you our version numbering system. We do have public versions as well as internal versions. For the RENESIS Player this would be:
- V1 (Official Version 0.1 - 0.7x)
- V2 (Official Version 1.0 - 1.9x)
- V3 (Official Version 2.x - 2.9x)
As you can see, V1 and V2 have already shipped. Now you might be asking why we do have internal version numbers? Well the reason is quite easy - V1 has been an old code base whereas V2 has been completely rewritten. The forthcoming V3 again is a rewrite of V2 and should feature the following things (among others):
- SVG 1.2 Mobile support (including SMIL Animations)
- Hardware Acceleration through OpenVG
- Support for Google’s V8 Javascript Engine
- Perfomance improvements
V3 is currently under heavy development and will not only be a ground-breaking new release (as due the support of SMIL as well as due the hardware acceleration and the perfomance gain through using Google’s optimized V8 engine as well more efficient DOM implementations) but it will also be the base platform for our Rave Authoring Tool. At this point, we are currently focusing on implementing SVG 1.2 Mobile and not SVG 1.1 full so for having SVG 1.1 full (except filters and animations) you still have to stick with V2. The reason for this decision is that we started integrating V3 into many embedded systems and soon saw the requirement of being able to implement one rock-solid standard made for those devices. As SVG 1.2 Mobile is almost out of the door and as it includes a much better test-suite, the decision has been quite clear to support SVG 1.2 Mobile first, then going back and implement additional SVG 1.1 features which we will transfer from V2 into V3.
Hello and welcome to the SVG Zone! After quite some internal changes, we’ve decided to give this blog a try and move the previous SVG Zone community back intot he examotion community. One of the reasons is that most people asked things about our RENESIS Technologie so as such, we’ve decided it’s better to keep the community within examotion and make this a freely blog in which we’ll be posting regular updates on either our company, our products, our projects or anything that might come around for Scalable Vector Graphics.
Our official community and communication efforts include the following aspects:
- Improve the communication by keeping the community updates through this blog
- Provide alpha and beta versions within our product cycles (see examotion Labs)
- Showcase where and how our technology and SVG is used (see examotion Spotlights)
- Provide an community through our corporate website where our developers will give answers
- Provide detailed information and downloads on our internal projects like
for example our “Renesis Control Library” which will all be made available through the examotion Labs
- Better reaction time on public bugtrackers
We know that all this will take time as this is a busy time for us but at the very least, we hope that with the labs, the spotlights, the new community and especially this blog we can better keep you involved about what’s going on.
October 7th, 2008 in
examotion |
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