Web Viz 2.0: A versatile suite of tools for collaboration and visualization

Most scientific applications on the web fail to realize the full collaborative potential of the internet by not utilizing web 2.0 technology. To relieve users from the struggle with software tools and allow them to focus on their research, new software developed for scientists and researchers must harness the full suite of web technology. For several years WebViz 1.0 enabled researchers with any web accessible device to interact with the peta-scale data generated by the Hierarchical Volume Renderer (HVR) system. We have developed a new iteration of WebViz that can be easily interfaced with many problem domains in addition to HVR by employing the best practices of software engineering and object-oriented programming. This is done by separating the core WebViz system from domain specific code at an interface, leveraging inheritance and polymorphism to allow newly developed modules access to the core services. We employed several design patterns (model-view-controller, singleton, observer, and application controller) to engineer this highly modular system implemented in Java.