Is VisAD right for this application ?

• To: visad-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
• Subject: Is VisAD right for this application ?
• From: James Adams <jadams@xxxxxxxx>
• Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2001 16:51:08 -0600

Hello,

I'm designing an application which will serve images of satellite
measurements of atmospheric chemical species to users via a web
interface.  I want to serve static images which will basically be
mappings of values to an rgb scale superimposed over a global or
regional map.  The user will be able to select which data to visualize
such as a chemical species, region (lat/lon area), pressure level,
date/time, etc.  After submitting the request they should get back an
image which shows the data selected.  I'd like to have radio buttons
which would allow the user to change pressure level views and the
ability to select a point on the image and get a detailed view of the
data at that point in a separate window.  I will most likely want to
offer the ability to create animations and 3D images of the data at some
point in the future as well.  I plan to use servlets so that all
processing is done on a server machine and only the resulting images are
sent back to the user's web browser. 

I have been doing a bit of research on how best to accomplish this and I
came across VisAD.  It appears to be excellent for doing stand-alone
applications for 3D visualization - the example apps are quite
impressive.  However after going through the documentation I'm concerned
that VisAD may not be right for what I want to do.  I have gone through
most of the VisAD tutorial and it appears that I face a steep learning
curve, and I'm not convinced that it's worth it for the simple
visualizations that I initially need to create.  I guess my main
concerns are that VisAD does so much and is hence too heavyweight for my
purposes, and that it wasn't designed to do what I'm after in the first
place.  However I haven't found any other Java libraries which are so
well suited for the visualization of scientific datasets so I'm not sure
of where else to turn.

Can I use VisAD in a limited way to produce the sort of static images I
want ?  Do you know of other Java libraries which might be better suited
for visualizing my NetCDF data ?  Has anyone ever used VisAD in
conjunction with servlets before (I've only seen a few applet examples)
?

I would really appreciate any feedback on this.  I'm just getting back
into visualization programming after an extended foray into e-commerce
and web development so I apologize if my questions are a bit elementary
or broad for such an advanced group of users.  Thanks in advance for any
suggestions, comments or recommendations.


-James

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Is VisAD right for this application ?
    • From: From: Bill Hibbard <hibbard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>