zipper

zig REST api server to store image data requests, e.g. for saving web canvas data

Rationale

Working with Web canvas API it's often tedious to export animations as movies right from the browser. Usually one ends up using a screen recording software (OBS, Quicktime, ...) or the browsers download feature (resulting in thousand of download prompts opening up).

This is a quick and dirty image request handler for storing images & image sequences right from canvas API animations.

Build & Run

git clone git@github.com:guidoschmidt/zipper.git
cd zipper
git submodule update --recursive --init
zig build
zig build run

Sending image data from the browser

Add the following Javascript/Typescript code and call it from your animation loop:

function saveCanvasToBackend(selector: string, sequence: string, frame: number) {
  const canvas: HTMLCanvasElement | null = document.querySelector(
    selector || "canvas"
  );
  if (canvas === null) {
    throw new Error(`No canvas element with ${selector} found`);
  }
  const dataUrl = canvas!
    .toDataURL("image/png")
    ?.replace("image/png", "image/octet-stream");
  const data = {
    imageData: dataUrl,
    foldername: `${sequence}`,
    filename: `${frame}`,
    ext: "png",
  };
  fetch("http://localhost:3000", {
    method: "POST",
    body: JSON.stringify(data),
  });
}

Implement any user interaction (button press, key press, etc) to set isRecording to true and call saveCanvasToBackend in the animation loop function:

let frame = 0;
let isRecording = false;

function draw() {
  if (isRecording) {
    saveCanvasToBackend("canvas", "Sequence-1", frame);
    frame++;
  }
}

TODO

• Error handling
• p5.js example
• three.js example