Investigating Web3D topics on StackOverflow: a preliminary study of WebGL and Three.js
Farag Almansoury, Sègla Kpodjedo, Ghizlane El Boussaidi · 2020
Web3D developers often have to decide on which technologies are best for their projects. We explore that question through the perspective of community attention and support on Stack Overflow (SO). We focused on i) WebGL, a key low-level JavaScript (JS) API used to render 3D graphics in browsers without plugins, and ii) Three.js, a higher level JS library that reuses WebGL and is reputed easier and more intuitive. We considered questions from SO tagged with WebGL or Three.js and extracted all tags used on these questions. Using these, we were able to compare the relative attention (considering the number of questions and views) and support (considering satisfactory answers and how long they take) received by concerns and technologies associated to WebGL and Three.js. Our results suggest that Three.js gets significantly more community attention but less community support than WebGL on SO.