After discussing with my mentor, we decided upon proceeding with Shdr as a GLSL editor for the PDE as it seemed easier to use and had most of the features we required mainly, syntax highlighting, code validation and a rendering window. 

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One key issue faced here was that Shdr is a web application while we needed a desktop application to be able to run with the PDE through IPC (Inter-process communication). The next step was to find out whether Shdr could be packaged as a desktop app using electron. For this I downloaded both the Shdr repository and the Electron quick start tutorial project repository from github. 

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Next steps involved downloading Node.js and NPM and compiling the  Shdr program using npm commands in the command prompt window (add image).

npm install

npm start

npm run build

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Once that program was successfully built and run through cmd I then proceeded to compile it using electron. However at first in order to make sure that electron was running successfully I first compiled and ran the quick-start electron tutorial project. For this I first downloaded electron framework both globally and locally and then ran the main.js file, which is the starter script that tells the program what to do. This generated a browser window with Hello World printed on it (add image).

 

After running the quick-start project I then proceeded to run the Shdr program through electron. At first I added an index.js file(a duplicate of main.js in the electron quick-start tutorial project) and changed the LoadURL arguments to the editor.html file path of the Shdr program. While in the directory of the Shdr project, I downloaded electron again locally and ran the index.js file. However this generated an empty/blank browser window instead of the Shdr web page contents. This was the main bottleneck for this week and would be dealt with in the following week. 

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