Re: Help.

From: rajarajeswari balasubramanian To: php-general@lists.php.net Sent: Friday, August 17, 2001 12:09 PM Subject: [PHP] Help. > I have a program whihc will take that coordinate file > as the input and it will convert that file into a 3D > structure, i have the exe file of that program. > > so the data is retrived it has to automatically invoke > the ./xxx file and it will give the 3D rendering of > that data which is in the form of coordinate file. I see a couple of approaches to this... 1. Run the .exe as a server-side CGI, returning an image or movie of the molecule. (Simple and widely compatible, but not interactive.) 2. Associate the file extension with your specialized viewer program on the client side. You send the data and it fires up the viewer prog automatically. (Reasonably simple but not very cross-compatible unless you feel like writing viewers for each different platform. Also could introduce security holes.) 3. Render to some generic format like VRML, which is already supported by the browser. (Reasonably simple and very compatible, if it does everything you want.) 4. Write a Java applet to do the rendering. (A bit more complicated, slower, but very cross-compatible and flexible. The Java SDK includes a sample molecule-viewer applet.) ... other suggestions? Personally, I think standards are a wonderful thing, so I would write a PHP library to convert from your raw format to VRML. (Alternately, you could store the VRML model in your database and just dump it directly.)