OpenGL for desktop applications has been around for a long time. But lately you’ve probably heard a lot about WebGL and how it is transforming graphics rendered in a web browser.
The consortium definition is quoted below. As highlighted in the quotation, here I will to show the similarities between desktop OpenGL and browser WebGL.
WebGL is a cross-platform, royalty-free web standard for a low-level 3D graphics API based on OpenGL ES 2.0, exposed through the HTML5 Canvas element as Document Object Model interfaces. Developers familiar with OpenGL ES 2.0 will recognize WebGL as a Shader-based API using GLSL, with constructs that are semantically similar to those of the underlying OpenGL ES 2.0 API. It stays very close to the OpenGL ES 2.0 specification, with some concessions made for what developers expect out of memory-managed languages such as JavaScript.
If you are not familiar with some of the terminology and code, review these pages.
OpenGL – Then and Now
Programmable pipeline with VBOs and Shaders
You can access the code at https://github.com/cognitivewaves/OpenGL-Render .
Desktop OpenGL : main.cpp
Browser WebGL : webgl/main.html
As you will see in the snapshots of code snippets, most of differences are in the programming language constructs of C/C++ vs JavaScript.
Shader Code
Shader Initialization
Draw/Render
Hope it provides some insight into how OpenGL and WebGL are more similar than different.
Cognitive Waves 