Web Based Extension Example

A web based SketchUp extension is an extension with a thin Ruby wrapper for displaying a web page, while most of the heavy lifting is done on your server. A typical example is an AI rendering or energy analysis but it cpuld also be a product catalog or an exporter.

This architecture comes with better protection of your intellectual property as much of the code doesn't have to run on the user's machine. It is also harder to pirate as you can do license checks server side, out of the user's reach.

This example shows how an AI renderer could act on a screenshot of the model but the full 3D model file could also be sent to the server for more advanced analysis.

This simplified example uses a local html file but a real web based extension would connect to your own server.

Loading into SketchUp

To load the extension from source into SketchUp, you can run this script in the SketchUp Ruby console, or place it in your SketchUp Plugins folder to run each time SketchUp is launched.

path = "C:/Users/Jane Doe/SketchUp Extensions/web-based-extension/src"
$LOAD_PATH << path
Dir.glob("#{path}/*.rb").each { |p| require p }

Replace the path with the location you clone this repository to.

To reload, you can use this snippet in the Ruby console.

path = "C:/Users/Jane Doe/SketchUp Extensions/web-based-extension/src"
Dir.glob("#{path}/**/*.rb").each { |p| load p }

Again, replace the path with the actual file location.

Alternatively, you can use ThomThom's Extension Sources.

Building

Zip the content of the src/ folder and change the file extension to .rbz.