I'm trying to find/understand Cesium APIs with a view to interface it to scala.js.
The "Visualizing Spatial Data" tutorial mentions the low level primitive API and the high-level Entity API, and I want to focus on just the Entity API.
From the Cesium website Documentation link, I can see an API and I assume this is the primitive API. Is there a link to the Entity API somewhere? If the Entity API is intermingled in this API, is there a way to determine what part is the Entity API?
I'm asking this because looking at the "Entity" documentation, it takes things like:
BillboardGraphics,PolygonGraphics, ...etc.
However in the examples Billboard, Polygon, ... etc are used.
The description of these are quite different from their xxxxGraphics.
I feel I missing something fundamental here. Similarly I can never find the CZML documentation from the website.
The “Primitive API” and “Entity API” are terms used to describe different classes and types within the overall Cesium codebase and API.
“Primitives” are the lower-level pieces like Billboards, Labels, and Polylines, which are created using their respective collection classes like BillboardCollection. You are responsible for managing the details of those items yourself.
“Entities” are a higher-level concept, where a single “Entity” could have multiple bits of display representation at once (a Billboard, a Label, a Polyline, a Polygon, etc). Entities are automatically created when data sources like CZML or KML are loaded, and you can also manually create Entity instances that aren’t tied to a data source as well. The Entity class uses the “[type]Graphics” classes to display and manage Primitives based on its own data. So, an Entity that is showing an icon would have a BillboardGraphics instance attached, and the BillboardGraphics instance would watch for changes in the Entity’s position and update a primitive Billboard appropriately. (The “[type]Visualizer” classes also fit into that sequence somewhere.)
See the following docs pages for more info and examples: