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3. Picking an X3DOM Version


Versions and Components

There are several versions of X3DOM available, so you might be wondering which one is best for your particular purposes. In general, we recommended to use the latest release version. However, if you require a new feature that is not yet available in the latest release, the dev version might also be interesting for you. As soon as you have finished the main development work for your Web application, you might like to deploy it along with a downloaded snapshot of the version you used during development. You might, for some reasons, also be interested in using an older release, maybe because it contained some experimental features which you used in your application, which were removed in a later X3DOM version.

All X3DOM releases, including the development version, are each available as a package of one javascript file (e.g., x3dom.js), one css file (e.g., x3dom.css) and optionally one shockwave file (e.g., x3dom.swf, for versions with flash support) under http://x3dom.org/download/ for download: The following tags, which you can include in the head of your HTML page, use the latest stable release of X3DOM:
    
    <script src="http://www.x3dom.org/release/x3dom.js"></script>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.x3dom.org/release/x3dom.css">
            
To use the current development version, which includes all cutting-edge features and fixes, use the following tags:
    
    <script src="http://www.x3dom.org/download/dev/x3dom.js"></script>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.x3dom.org/download/dev/x3dom.css">
            
To use the X3DOM-Full release of version 1.5, which includes the HTML profile plus all other components available, you would use the following lines:
            
    <script src="http://www.x3dom.org/download/1.5/x3dom-full.js"></script>                
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.x3dom.org/download/1.5/x3dom.css">            
            
Finally, to use the regular X3DOM release of version 1.3 plus the additional Geospatial component and with additional flash support, you could write:

    <script src="http://www.x3dom.org/download/1.3/x3dom.js"></script>
    <script src="http://www.x3dom.org/download/1.3/components/Geospatial.js"></script>                
    <script src="http://www.x3dom.org/download/1.3/x3dom.swf"></script>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.x3dom.org/download/1.3/x3dom.css">                
            

Debugging

If, for whatever reason, you would like to be able to look into the source code of X3DOM when debugging your application, you can replace x3dom.js with x3dom.debug.js, and you can replace x3dom-full.js with x3dom-full.debug.js. Please note that this feature is available from X3DOM version 1.4, and not available for older versions. While the debug version, in contrast to the minified version, contains human-readable formatting and comments, it is also significantly larger than the minified version. Therefore, it is not well-suited as a final version for the distribution of your Web application, but only for temporary debugging purposes during application development.