In the process of product development, several software tools are involved. Such tools are CAD, simulation and vizualization tools. During development process, the engineer must switch from one tool to another several times. Also, large amounts of data need to be passed from one tool to the next in the process. We employed an approach of controlling several applications using a web based integration platform.

Using CORBA middleware, data are passed in a faster and more direct way between applications, compared to the file based data exchange that was used before. A CORBA interface has been designed and implemented for passing results from a finite element solver to a visualization tool. This can be done during the simulation run.

For embedding the visualization tool into the integration platform, the tool has been equipped with a Java based graphical user interface. This Java applet is embedded into the integration platform's web page. Thus, it communicates through JavaScript with the integration platform. Simultaneously, it communicates with the visualization tool through CORBA.

For further information see the publication

N. Frisch and T. Ertl.
Embedding Visualisation Software into a Simulation Environment.
In Proceedings of the Spring Conference on Computer Graphics, Bratislava, 2000. (9 pages, 577KB)