DataViews announces a pre-release (beta) version of the WebXpresso Plug-in that allows you to view, navigate, animate, and print 2-D and 3-D graphics from within the Netscape Navigator web browser.
Install WebXpresso for Windows(R) 95 or Windows NT(TM) and try out the sample files to see how to take advantage of WebXpresso on your web server.
The WebXpresso plug-in marks a major technological advancement for graphics on the Internet. The plug-in makes it possible for Internet and Intranet users to view interactive object-oriented 3-D graphics online as opposed to the traditional static raster formats currently associated with Internet use.
WebXpresso drawings (also called widgets) are hierarchies of objects, where each object may be selected and edited. Our WYSIWYG editor allows for rapid, non-programmed creation of object hierarchies. A generic resource mechanism allows the attributes of these object to be modified. This provides a powerful and flexible animation mechanism, allowing you to dynamically change anything inside the widget.
Graphics are made dynamic by feeding a stream of resources into the drawing after it has been loaded into the plug-in. This resource stream may originate from a client-side script, or from the web server.
Interaction within the drawing is possible by connecting control objects to other graphical objects using a built-in constraints mechanism.
Links can be established between graphical objects and other web pages by using the appropriate URLs for the object names. Clicking on an object traverses this link.
The Netscape Navigator plug-in that allows WebXpresso graphics to be embedded into web pages. The plug-in also provides these additional capabilities:
Interaction. Drawings inside the plug-in can be interacted with by the user. Such interaction is actually built into the drawings itself during construction, but is supported by the plug-in.
Animation. All graphical object have attributes called resources that can be modified - both statically within the editor, and dynamically within the plug-in. Resource values and update requests can be fed into the plug-in from an associated data plug-in or from the web server.
Navigation. Graphical objects in the drawing can be named. This is what allows their attributes to be modified by a data stream. If an objects name begins with http:, then the object is cosidered to be a link to the given URL.
Several widget packages are available including 2-D graphs, 3-D graphs, Controls, Specialty Widgets, and a Table Widget.
The WebXpresso Graph Editor is used to edit the layout and graphical appearance of a widget interactively. With the Editor you can add custom titles and labels, change colors, or combine widget into composite drawings. The Editor can also be used to test the dynamic behavior of the drawing by animating graphics. This animation is accomplished using the same commands one uses to animate the drawing in a plug-in.
The Graphics Builder extends the Editor's capability by adding a palette of graphics primitives. The Builder allows developers to create arbitrarily complex (see sample) and application-specific graphics for use in the WebXpresso Standard Plug-in, or with custom plug-ins.
The Drawing Server runs on a web server that uses WebXpresso and is responsible for translating drawing files into the WebXpresso Plugin format. The Drawing Server is a CGIBIN executable that works in conjunction with the plug-in.
The Plug-in Development Kit is geared to satisfy the needs of demanding web applications. Developers can make use of the powerful WebXpresso API to create, manipulate, save, and load objects. In addition, a custom plug-in can make full use of the Netscape plug-in and client-side APIs.