Question

I’m working on a browser based game atm and already looking into options porting it to other platforms such as consoles or devices where playing in a web browser may not be suitable.

The game is pretty much all JavaScript with rendering done via a 2d canvas context.

What i was hoping for is that there is already a c++ library/api that will work in conjunction with maybe google’s v8 engine to handle the canvas calls in JavaScript and render them with opengl or something similar

Does anyone know of a project out there that may be providing this functionality?

Otherwise how would you suppose I go about embedding my javascript in c++ with as little changes required to the javascript as possible as I don’t really want to have to maintain too many differences between platforms?

Answer 1

Qt is a very nice C++ library compatible with LGPL licensing that among other things includes a webkit based widget with javascript support. Also as scripting language Qt uses javascript with a tight integration with C++ (it’s easy to write a C++ class and and make it visible at the javascript level).

Qt is multi platform and comes with an highly sophisticated IDE.

Qt is not currently using V8 but the porting is in progress and they aim at providing a 100% backward compatible solution.

The only “problems” of Qt are IMO that:

• It’s huge
• It’s a framework, not a library. You cannot just “use” Qt easily, you should embrace the view (the documentation is however of excellent quality).
• The long term prospects are a bit fuzzy (not as bad as a few months ago, tho)