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[IDV #KVK-267436]: Using IDV as an image generator

> Sorry, maybe using "headless" was not a great description.
> 
> I've been doing lots of digging through your ISL documentation and workshop 
> docs.  Things look very promising for what we're trying to do.  However, we'd 
> like to use the IDV within our own java application, without having to make 
> command line arguments and create a new jvm for the IDV program.
> 
> Do you have any documentation or examples that describe how to use IDV and 
> ISL as a referenced java library from within another java application?
> 
> Thanks again for any help you can provide.  I really appreciate it.
> 
> Mark
> 

Mark,
     I get a better understanding of what you are trying to do now. In your 
Java application, you want to generate certain images and hope to include the 
IDV as a library inside your application. I would say it is certainly possible 
and it sounds like an interesting project. We don't have any example, but 
technically it is not difficult. Is your application going to support 3D 
display or integrating different data sources?

Yuan
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Unidata IDV Support [mailto:address@hidden]
> Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2013 5:30 PM
> To: Staroska, Mark A CTR USAF AFWA 2 SYOS/SEMS RM 3250
> Cc: address@hidden; Baardson, Kyle L CTR USAF AFWA AFWA/WDA
> Subject: [IDV #KVK-267436]: Using IDV as an image generator
> 
> > IDV Support Team,
> >
> > My name is Mark Staroska, I'm a software engineer working at the Air Force 
> > Weather Agency (AFWA). I work on a team that develops Java plugin software 
> > to FalconView (http://www.falconview.org/trac/FalconView) that retrieves 
> > and displays weather data from many sources, including acquiring gridded 
> > binary data from Weather Data Analysis (WDA). We use either 1.0 degree or 
> > 0.5 degree GFS or various resolution WRF models depending on what 
> > operational theater we are near.
> >
> > We are surveying tools to visualize GRIB files within FalconView, so that 
> > flight mission planners may quickly see what (for example) winds, or icing, 
> > or turbulence are going to be like over the route they are planning. We are 
> > also interested in visualizing winds to allow planners to plan routes that 
> > reduce fuel consumption and to allow more precise air drops. Along with 
> > IDV, we are also looking at McIDAS-V, VisAD, NASA's WorldWind application, 
> > or perhaps a home-grown solution using netCDF ourselves directly.
> >
> > Now obviously we don't want to reinvent the wheel. One of the first tenets 
> > of writing software is that there's always someone smarter out there that's 
> > already done it. The IDV UI seems to have all the tools we need, the 
> > ability to process grib data, already supports derived conditions, and has 
> > very impressive in-UI rendering.  We'd like to do all of that, but without 
> > the UI.
> >
> > Is there a way to directly use the IDV jar to headlessly generate and write 
> > imagery to disk from within another application? I see in the documentation 
> > ways to use ISL scripts while IDV runs in an offscreen mode, but we'd like 
> > to just use the java library. Is this possible, and have you ever heard of 
> > anyone trying this before? Is there documentation or examples anywhere that 
> > explain how we could do this?
> >
> 
> Hi Mark,
> It is not clear to me when you mentioned headlessly. In the real headless 
> environment, you can use the Xvfb or xvnc to run the IDV jar file, but this 
> is not the most efficient way.
> In a normal desktop environment (with good video card), a few powful users 
> have been running the IDV to generate images for operation usage. The 
> benchmark we have from our user is that IDV can generate over 1000 images in 
> less than 6 minutes. This is under IDV scripting language (ISL). The detail 
> information of ISL is available in our training document:
> 
> http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/idv/docs/workshop/toc.html#index.html
> 
> 
> 
> Let us know if you need more help.
> 
> Yuan
> 
> > Thanks so much for your time and any help you can provide.
> >
> > For your info, CC'd is Kyle Baardson, the project lead for the software 
> > project plugin in question (FalconView Weather).
> >
> > V/R,
> > Mark Staroska
> > HQ AFWA/SEMS
> >
> >
> >
> 
> 
> Ticket Details
> ===================
> Ticket ID: KVK-267436
> Department: Support IDV
> Priority: Normal
> Status: Closed
> 
> 


Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: KVK-267436
Department: Support IDV
Priority: Normal
Status: Open