Re: [Update REQ 6975]: Geomview question

[munzner at cs.stanford.edu]

> I am trying to view the geometries I create using an application on the
> browser and be able to move them just like I do it interactively with
> Geomview. Can you suggest a good way to do this? I have tried to do this
> using an application (actually an applet) called JGV but I could not get
> it to work.

First of all, if you're trying to actually render in the browser it's
going to be very slow. (Although if you're on a Sun without Creator3D
graphics maybe you're used to a low framerate.)

There are three approaches: 1) something that runs in the browser
using Java, 2) a plugin or helper application (which means you need a
binary for each machine type), 3) something that runs on the server. 

JGV is of type 1. I'm not one of the JGV authors so I probably can't
help you figure out what went wrong, that's what I would think is your
best bet. My vague impression was that it was a pretty primitive
viewer without all the bells and whistles of Geomview, but I might be
wrong. Somebody else on this software alias might know more.

You can set things up so that Geomview operates as a helper
application of type 2 that's triggered by a mouseclick in the browser,
using mime type tricks, which is what the WebOOGL experiment did (at
http://www.geom.umn.edu/software/weboogl/). But of course you'd need
to have Geomview installed the machine for this to work.

The cyberview experiment at http://www.geom.umn.edu/apps/cyberview/ is
type 3. The server is doing the rendering based on your interactions
and sends an image file back to you. 

Finally, if you just need to view the geometry without using any of
the Geomview special features you could try converting the Geomview
files to VRML and use one of the VRML viewers since they exist for
most platforms now. The oogl2vrml converter is included in the
Geomview distribution.

Hope this helps,
TM