best language for 3D manipulation over web ?

Randall Hopper aa8vb at yahoo.com
Fri Jun 1 08:25:49 EDT 2001


Jacqueline L. Spiegel:
 |
 |I will be writing a program that needs to be accessible over the web that
 |will seek to manipulate objects in three dimensions through the access of an
 |oracle database.  I could be manipulating as much as 32 MB of memory (with
 |respect to data only)  in space.   I would also need to slice and
 |interpolate information on the fly.

There's not enough detail here about your constraints to get a good feel
for your visualization or operating requirements.  From your address, I'm
guessing medical imaging datasets (CT, MR, etc.).

If by "over the web" you mean the web-at-large by DSL, cable modem, and
phone modem users alike who don't necessarily have 3D accelerators, then
pulling 32MB of data over the net for manip on the client end with Java is
probably not realistic.  I'm going to guess you want server-side processing.

Consider using the free OpenDX package (formerly IBM Data Explorer):

     http://www.opendx.org/
     http://www.research.ibm.com/dx/
     http://www.freebsd.org/~rhh/py-opendx/

It has a graphical network editor for fast prototyping, and you can code
your network in C or C++ as well.  Write a CGI over top and you're set.
I've done exactly this for 3D geodata web server.  Much, much less effort
involved than using a general scene graph or bare-metal graphics rendering
library.

There's also JavaDX, an OpenDX back-end that allows you to connect a web
server up more directly to DX, change the values in the network, and feed
images or VRMLs back to the web user.

Randall

-- 
Randall Hopper
aa8vb at yahoo.com




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