As earlier reported, Fabric Engine brings compiled, multi-threaded performance to scripted languages like JavaScript, Ruby and Python. This allows developers to use web languages to solve computationally intensive problems, such as CG-related applications, that would otherwise be too slow to run in the browser. Fabric Engine is currently in open beta testing, the final version is expected to be released in March under a dual license model, with open-source and commercial licensing/support options available. New demos showing Fabric Engine’s latest developments have been posted at the company’s Vimeo channel and demo repository. More information at Fabric Engine’s site.
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to bad you have to install a plugin.
You can run Fabric Engine on a server – if you just want to do a lot of processing and send a result back to a vanilla web client, then it’s fine. We do that with the video watermark processing and facial recognition demos.
The plug-in is if you want native multi-threaded performance in the browser. Without the plug-in, you lose things that are critical for a desktop application (local file access, custom data types etc). The plug-in also makes it possible to work with Collada and Alembic or stream data from hardware devices (mocap). Until browser standards move a long way forward, a viable high-end DCC application isn’t going to be possible. Just to be clear here – the performance in Fabric is better than the majority of desktop content creation tools – take a look at the performance of http://vimeo.com/groups/fabric/videos/36358292. If you think of Fabric Engine in that context, installing a plug-in is less effort than installing an application.