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“Portage” here really means to keep most of the original application logic and just make it work with the new platform. Dealing with the detailsĪnd of course, there are the thousands of little details that will make it a bit more difficult to port from GE to Cesium. This also gives some sort of guarantee about the future and the liveliness of the platform. This can really speed up bug fixing or at least help to find a workaround to some problems. The philosophy behind Cesium is also different: it is open source! Everyone is free to look at the code and eventually modify it if needed. It used to be a challenge to overlay HTML elements on top of the GE plugin (iFrame shims) it is just natural with Cesium.įinally, Cesium, thanks to WebGL, is truly cross-platform and also runs on mobile, Linux, or pretty much everything that can run a modern web browser. WebGL is pure HTML: the Canvas element fits naturally within the HTML page and can be manipulated in a very simple way (CSS, JS). Having Cesium running as a JavaScript application makes debugging a breeze compared to GE: setting a breakpoint in the debugger would make the GE plugin crash, the call-stack would not go further than the NAPI interface, etc. And this brings a lot of advantages, the first being that no download or installation is required: WebGL runs natively in modern web browsers. While GE relied on a plugin, Cesium uses native WebGL. The major technical difference is the technology behind these two platforms.

Only a few minor changes will have to be made: GE and Cesium reverse the latitude and longitude in their API calls, Cesium loads glTF 3D files instead of COLLADA files, etc. So if the application abstracts the API calls well enough, it is relatively easy to migrate.

For example, moving a camera to a specific location, on both platforms, involves a function call with latitude, longitude, and altitude. Porting a simple application from one to the other involves nothing more than adapting the API calls.

Cesium and Google Earth (GE) are both visualization tools that show a globe with aerial imagery and elevation data while offering an API to interact with.