WWT WebGL Engine Reference Manual

Getting Started

There are a range of ways that you can use the WWT WebGL engine, depending on the level of sophistication that you’re trying to achieve and the tools you’re prepared to use.

• If you want to deploy a generic interface for astronomical data visualization, you can probably skip most of the coding by simply embedding the WWT research app and not building your own custom UI.
• Prototyping a custom UI with basic HTML and JavaScript, and no build tools or fancy infrastructure? You may want to use the hosted JavaScript model. But for serious applications, we recommend adopting more sophisticated tooling.
• If you’re using npm or another JavaScript package manager, a slightly more elaborate approach is the bundled TypeScript model: import the @wwtelescope/engine package into your project and interface with it using the TypeScript language.
• If the bundled TypeScript approach sounds good and you can use Vue with Pinia — or if you don’t know that you can’t use them — we strongly recommend the Vue/Pinia component model.