Manuel Ohlendorf

Things from and about me

L-System parser with Jangaroo

Posted at — Mar 14, 2011

Have you ever heard of Jangaroo? It is an ActionScript®-to-Javascript compiler. It's an open-source project with an implementation of the Flash® API and the whole toolchain every programmer likes: Maven dependency management, good IDE support, TDD with JooUnit (a port of FlexUnit) and a lot more. It even comes with a declarative UI language EXML (well, it is quite similar to MXML), that can be used to generate ExtJS applications. For about a year I am now also helping to evolve Jangaroo and its toolchain.

Once upon the time when Adobe® Flex was the next big thing, I was very much impressed by this cool technology. I developed an UI during a professional project with Flex 3 and was a beta tester for Adobe® Flex 4 and all the tools that came with it like FlexBuilder and Thermo. Back then I wrote a little Lindenmayer system parser with a Flex 4 UI: lsystem.

Below you see some Lindenmayer systems that are generated with the Jangaroo version of the original Flash® lsystem parser. It is still the same code, but the program now completely runs in the browser – without any plugin and only with HTML5. The code can be found here: lsystem-jangaroo.

All in all there are 10 Lsystem presets that can be viewed with my litte program: