How to draw a grid mesh on a web page?

Question

For many finite element and finite volume analyses, people want to see results visually. This is usually done with a desktop application, but is it possible to display these results on a webpage, that is to let pre-processing and post-processing become an online application? For example, ParaView is a desktop based application for computational fluid dynamics, but could it's output be realized on a web page?

Answer 1

Of course it can be rendered on the web - anything that can be rendered in a window on a desktop can be sent to a browser.

I'm not sure how common it is to interact in real-time in the browser, because the computations for rendering contours might be intensive enough where they'll need to be done on the server.

It's been a long time since I worked in that field, so I'm not up to date on the state of the art. But I believe it's entirely possible.

UPDATE: This paper suggests that it can be done. So does this one.

Answer 2

You should look at ParaViewWeb. Quoted from the design page:

developers can build websites or web portals with visualization and data processing capabilities. These components can be easily integrated into Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) developed using popular web designing infrastructures including qooxdoo, Dojo, Google Web Toolkit, jQuery, Flex, Java and other.