Advanced geometry loading techniques: JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) and AJAX

So far, we have rendered very simple objects. Now let's study a way to load the geometry (vertices and indices) from a file instead of declaring the vertices and the indices every time we call initBuffers. To achieve this, we will make asynchronous calls to the web server using AJAX. We will retrieve the file with our geometry from the web server and then we will use the built-in JSON parser to convert the context of our files into JavaScript objects. In our case, these objects will be the vertices and indices array.

Introduction to JSON – JavaScript Object Notation

JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation. It is a lightweight, text-based, open format used for data interchange. JSON is commonly used as an alternative to XML.

The JSON format is language-agnostic. This means that there are parsers in many languages to read and interpret JSON objects. Also, JSON is a subset of the object literal notation of JavaScript...