> *OO vs procedural/functional is quite the different design approach. I 
would even say that those are worlds apart.*

Tell that to the React creators, that switched the framework from OO to 
functional.  😝

On Sunday, 9 February 2025 at 8:49:40 am UTC+11 Leon wrote:

> I can see where you say a developer familiar with the DOM is more likely 
> to work with on the canvas api directly.
> And yes, the more technical options the better. Sure. 
> But I do not see how you can say that an OO vs procedural or functional 
> approach is not that relevant? OO vs procedural/functional is quite the 
> different design approach. I would even say that those are worlds apart. In 
> what way do you think that this difference not relevant?
>
>
> On Sat, Feb 8, 2025 at 8:53 PM Colin Alworth <[email protected]> 
> wrote:
>
>>
>> @Craig - If you draw everything on the same canvas, the zoom/scale works 
>> on everything on that canvas. it limits what you can do with that canvas. 
>> If you want to scale or zoom everything, yes then it doesn't matter. So yes 
>> you are right, it depends on the project.
>>
>> This isn't true, it only applied on the operations that take place while 
>> it is set. You can call scale(1, 1) to go back to 1:1, or you can use the 
>> save()/restore() that Craig mentioned. You can also clip to keep the zoomed 
>> content within certain bounds.
>>
>> @Colin - With multiple layers I would also need multiple canvas's and 
>> overlay them right? 
>>
>> Correct - each would have its own frame buffer, and could be 
>> cleared/drawn independently.
>>  
>>
>> We wrote a single adapter widget that uses a single canvas. This adapter 
>> widget knows what the zoom level is. Objects that are drawn on that widget 
>> of a certain type get zoomed, whilst others of a different type do not. It 
>> is super simple and easily explained to new devs. Everyone on the team can 
>> add views or objects and the type determines how these are displayed. Even 
>> devs without exact knowledge of how the canvas works can develop and 
>> maintain objects to be displayed.
>>
>> I guess it's also a development style/preference thing. If you code the 
>> view of the canvas in a single class or single method, the solution is 
>> likely to have to rely more on the technological capabilities of the 
>> canvas. Working with an adapter then does not really make a lot of sense. 
>> If you have more of an OO style of development, you express more in 
>> functional blocks. Then you have to rely less on the technical capabilities 
>> as you can translate what needs to be done on the basis of what your 
>> objects are before you hit the canvas. Then the zooming/scaling happens 
>> in the object, not on the canvas so to speak.
>> So the required functionality of the canvas remains fairly basic.
>>
>> I don't make these suggestions lightly - if you are happy with how canvas 
>> performs and the quality of the output, then you may well never need them, 
>> but it can be fun to know they exist.
>>
>> I don't much care about OO vs FP styles for this - building an API around 
>> these features should be straightforward within whatever paradigm you 
>> prefer. For most projects we ended up with roughly two layers of 
>> abstractions - the "shapes that get drawn on the screen via canvas 
>> commands" abstraction (iterate through "shapes", respect their "z-index" or 
>> other relative positioning, capture clicks and figure out which "shape" was 
>> clicked on, redraw only changed "shapes" and those that intersect them, 
>> etc), and the "business logic drives what shapes to draw" abstraction ("I 
>> want a pie chart in the corner, compute slices based on data", "these 
>> buttons over here control those axes", "Labeled items in the legend will 
>> drive which stars/circles in the chart are highlighted when hovered"). It 
>> feels natural to someone who is used to working with a DOM (esp SVG), and 
>> can handle thousands of items without much trouble. 
>>
>> Zoom can appear at either level here - multiple coord systems, or make 
>> the "zoom" part of the "shape" API. You're totally correct that scaling 
>> need not happen at the "canvas level" - while the MDN link I gave seems to 
>> imply that, it really is just trying to make it easier for the developer to 
>> not need to think about one more "layer" of ways that their data needs to 
>> be transformed. From a certain perspective, you might want to just have a 
>> transform matrix that you apply to each shape, and compose your 
>> zoom-because-zoom-widget, translate-because-panning, rotate, etc operations 
>> all at that level, and just apply the transform once when drawing (or even 
>> apply to the coords before you call in to canvas). None of it matters as 
>> long as the math is correct.
>>
>> If you need more power, odds are you can find pretty quickly where the 
>> "unnecessary" O(n^2) or O(n lg n) operations are taking place (sorted 
>> insertion by z-index, solving for intersections, etc), and can do a better 
>> job partitioning "shapes" or go all out and drop down to just "business 
>> logic drives canvas commands" where it is required.
>>
>>  
>>
>> performance wise, I've done fully animated person relation networks and 
>> animated dashboards in large canvases for nearly a decade now. 
>> We've never ran into any performance issues. 
>> That being said, I think the views and on-screen actions we used were 
>> somewhat limited when compared to developing a game with full world 
>> rendering or something similar. 
>>  
>> Did I already say I love this gwt group? It makes me think a lot more 
>> about what I am doing and why I am doing it. 
>> Plus the input from the GWT devs usually give me insights I haven't 
>> thought about before or didn't know existed.
>>
>> If you can stand the stream of discussion, you may also enjoy 
>> https://matrix.to/#/#gwtproject_gwt:gitter.im. It tends to be more 
>> conversational, and can get into the weeds in unrelated topics like this.
>>  
>>
>> On Sat, Feb 8, 2025 at 2:56 AM Colin Alworth <[email protected]> 
>> wrote:
>>
>> I'm sorry if my message confused the two kinds of 'zoom' being discussed 
>> here - there's the one where the pixels on the physical monitor don't match 
>> the pixels of your display (this covers both HDPI and ctrl +/-), and 
>> there's the one where the user clicks the + icon (drawn on the canvas) to 
>> make everything inside a specific rectangle bigger.
>>
>> The context2d.scale() method can do both, but I was mostly referring to 
>> the first, adapting to the user's current monitor+settings at any given 
>> time. Note that in this context, scale() does _not_ make things blurry when 
>> you zoom, but effectively multiplies all your coordinates by the scale. The 
>> canvas "height" and "width" (the "actual size" in the link's code sample) 
>> are what makes things blurry or super precise.
>>
>> In the second case, scale() can still be totally appropriate, especially 
>> if coupled with a "panning" feature, or if data is updating. Odds are very 
>> high that in those cases, the parts of the canvas outside the "rectangle" 
>> aren't moving - all the various controls, the rectangle itself. Avoiding 
>> redrawing whatever you can each frame is important for performance. Or, you 
>> can just adjust your coordinate system when projecting on to the canvas, 
>> multiplying by your current zoom factor for each position - as above, it is 
>> doing the same thing.
>>
>> While we're discussing it, clipping (with save/restore or without) still 
>> also be helpful to conserve rewrites too - if you had a single canvas 
>> element, you would clip to inside the rectangle, clear, and redraw only 
>> what is in there - save() and restore() are a valid way of handling that, 
>> or just reapply state at each pass. If you're careful, you could even just 
>> redraw a subset of the rectangle's contents - solve for which items 
>> actually changed (doing some intersection math), and clip+clearRect just 
>> that section, then redraw just what is in there. If you "draw" a little 
>> outside the clip in any of these cases, no big deal - it will get clipped 
>> out (but you'll still pay for the code to run, it just won't have any 
>> overdraw).
>>
>> If you think about this like "partitioning" the drawing area with clip, 
>> there are two other ways to partition too - you can "tile" canvases, 
>> selectively redrawing their entire contents if they are affected, and you 
>> can "layer" them, using transparency to enable lower layers or higher 
>> layers to remain intact when other layers need to be cleared and repainted. 
>> Tiling can also work with non-homogenous blocks - the "rectangle" above 
>> could be one canvas, and the "controls" could be in their own.
>>
>> On Friday, February 7, 2025 at 5:11:41 PM UTC-6 [email protected] 
>> wrote:
>>
>> > *I would not use the scale functionality as it applies to the whole 
>> canvas. *
>>
>> Whatever works for your project is best, however, the scale only applies 
>> when you set it.  And you can always reset it.  Eg:
>>
>> // Save the current state
>> context2d.save();
>>
>> // Apply zoom
>> context2d.scale(xxx, xxx);
>>
>> // Draw zoomed stuff
>> ...
>>
>> // Reset the zoom
>> context2d.restore();
>>
>> This also lets browsers use the GPU to render (although, I'm not actually 
>> sure if the scaling is done on the CPU or the GPU).
>>
>> On Friday, 7 February 2025 at 5:02:17 pm UTC+11 Leon Pennings wrote:
>>
>> I would not use the scale functionality as it applies to the whole 
>> canvas. 
>> I'd prefer to apply an adapter pattern for determining actual coordinates 
>> on the canvas. 
>> Then you can still have a toolbar, location display or slider for the 
>> zoom factor in it's normal proportions and just have the actual content you 
>> want to show in a different scale. 
>>
>> Op donderdag 6 februari 2025 om 13:33:12 UTC+1 schreef Colin Alworth:
>>
>> No problem - I wanted to be sure I didn't make a mistake, since I haven't 
>> myself used canvas "in anger" in many years, and only loosely keep track of 
>> resources and advice on it.
>>
>> SmartGWT's "Draw" examples make the API look very similar to the GXT 
>> "draw" packages - it isn't really a raster API at all, but a vector API 
>> that just happens to be built on top of a canvas implementation. 
>>
>> My recollection is that for fewer than around 1k-10k drawn items, SVG is 
>> faster and simpler to understand than canvas, and canvas's benefits only 
>> start kicking in when the DOM gets too heavy to manipulate quickly each 
>> frame. Looking briefly at the example page you shared a few weeks ago, if 
>> you were interested in getting into the low level details of how to do the 
>> drawing, your case perhaps could stand being remade in plain SVG - always 
>> high resolution. The benefits may be mostly for your own understanding 
>> rather than any real observed performance improvements from running the 
>> page (that said: dropping SmartGWT would appear to drop almost 8mb of JS 
>> out of your 9+mb page).
>>
>> On Wednesday, February 5, 2025 at 9:46:51 PM UTC-6 
>> [email protected] wrote:
>>
>> > Neil, I'm not sure where I appeared to have said that.
>>
>>  
>>
>> I am sorry, I did not intend to put words in your mouth.
>>
>> That was my understanding from your previous email stating
>> that  canvas is a raster format.  I misinterpreted your statements.
>>
>>  
>>
>> I apologize for that.
>>
>>  
>>
>> Thank you,
>>
>>  Neil 
>>
>>  
>>
>> --
>>
>> Neil Aggarwal, (972) 834-1565, http://www.propfinancing.com
>>
>> We offer 30 year loans on single family houses!
>>
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