So, after a couple of weeks beavering away on this of an evening, I’m pleased to announce the initial release of Sylvester, a vector and matrix mathematics library for Javascript. The project site has a bunch more information, and API docs for about half the code. My plan is to build this up into a 3D geometry and rendering framework over time, but I’m trying to make all the classes as generally useful as possible. I’ve seen a bunch of 3D renderers around the web and they seem to mostly be proofs of concept without a more general-purpose API. The one exception to this would be Matt Westcott’s Canvastastic, which I like a lot, but it doesn’t expose its core building blocks – vectors, matrices and the like. It has methods for multiplying specific types of matrices, but no general-purpose classes for doing this type of maths.

I want Sylvester to expose as much as possible of its functionality as useful classes so people can take the bits they like and go and write maths code for whatever they want to do. Each release will add new components that are built on top of the existing ones, so you’ll be able to take away as much or as little of the library as you need.

As always, I’d love to hear what people think – shoot suggestions and bug reports to james@jcoglan.com.