Very cool :) WebAssembly is also useful on the desktop: Another opportunity with WebAssembly is supporting qgis plugins as an alternative to python/c++. It would provide the versatility of python (can be used across platforms) with near native performance. I think WebAssembly isn't ready/mature for this just yet (waiting on the component model to mature ( https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model), but it might be a good option - WebAssembly modules/binaries can be written in many different programming languages so not limited to python and c++...
On Fri, Mar 18, 2022 at 12:36 AM Martin Dobias via QGIS-Developer < qgis-developer@lists.osgeo.org> wrote: > Hi all > > Recently I was wondering if it would be possible to have QGIS running > natively in browser thanks to WebAssembly. Many hours later, I have a > small, very rough, proof of concept: > https://wonder-sk.github.io/wasm/qgis.html > > If you have a reasonably up-to-date browser, you should be able to browse > the map - zoom in/out and move map, either with buttons or by dragging map > and using mouse wheel. And you can switch to other demo projects (but not > all work fully at this point). > > For those that are not familiar with WebAssembly - the whole point here is > that ALL the map rendering is happening in your browser, there is no > server-side rendering going on. The demo QGIS projects get downloaded (as > .qgz) together with the source data files (.gpkg, .shp, .tif or others) and > all this gets loaded and processed by the browser. > > How is the demo built: there's qgis core library with gdal/ogr provider > and the usual dependencies (PROJ, GDAL, GEOS etc), all compiled to a single > .wasm file using Emscripten. The output binary is over 30 MB, but it > compresses well to ~12 MB with gzip. It is built on top of Qt6 and many > hacks to get things somehow going. I have created a minimal C API (used > from JavaScript) to load a QGIS project, do rendering to a QImage and then > a bit of JavaScript to display the map image in HTML canvas and handle map > navigation. > > There is a long list of issues that would need to be solved in order to > get something useful out of this, but I am really excited about the > prospect of being able to run QGIS code natively in a web browser(!). > WebAssembly is nowadays supported by over 90% web users according to > https://caniuse.com/wasm - so it's quite widely available. > > With some development effort, it will be possible to use WebAssembly to > our advantage in various ways. Imagine that people could just go to > qgis.org and start their QGIS session in the web browser (without > draining QGIS infrastructure - all code/rendering is run on the client!). > > I am very keen to hear what you think about QGIS and WebAssembly. In the > coming days I would like to also get the build system and my hacks > available in a git repo, so that others can start to play with it... > > Cheers > Martin > > _______________________________________________ > QGIS-Developer mailing list > QGIS-Developer@lists.osgeo.org > List info: https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer > Unsubscribe: https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer >
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