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Highlights
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Industry:
Data warehousing
Key Business Issues
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Help customers visualize data by incorporating 3D graphics.
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Increase portability across operating systems.
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Reduce development time.
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Expected Business Results
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Improved business solutions with portable, real-world graphics.
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Improved time-to-market.
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Improved customer satisfaction.
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Java 3D API Customer Success Stories
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SAS Institute in Summary
"Sun understands that customer satisfaction is the core of any
enterprise and its products reflect that belief. The Java 3D API will
allow us to deliver real-world applications to our customers quickly and
easily, without sacrificing high-end visualization features."
Stuart Nisbet
Director of Advanced Visualization
SAS Institute
Java 3D API Improves Software, Illustrates Data
SAS Institute, the world's largest privately held software company, is he market leader in integrated data warehousing and decision support. AS solutions access data from almost every platform in the computing orld today. More than 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies use SAS Software to transform raw data into tangible information they can use to make business decisions on everything from personnel to investment opportunities. SAS Institute uses 3D graphics to restate data analysis visually, making it easier to understand. Stuart Nisbet, Director of Advanced Visualization at SAS Institute, needed to make the SAS decision support data even easier to use and manipulate. In the past, SAS Institute's high-end visualization group used the many different graphics APIs, porting the finished product to the end-user's preferred platform, a process that sometimes took up to eighteen months. Due to the wide-range of its customers' preferred platforms, from Microsoft Windows 3.1 to mainframe systems, SAS Institute was interested in streamlining its business solutions and saving its software engineers from spending countless hours recompiling code for different platforms. The Java 3D API is the first solution which allows SAS Institute to accomplish these goals.
"We were attracted to the Java 3D API because of its portability. Our engineers will be able to develop 3D applications and deliver graphical data to our customers much faster than we've been able to in the past," said Nisbet. "It's no longer necessary to rewrite the application for each customer platform, and with Java 3D API you get a portable API without sacrificing performance."
Network-Centric API is Portable Solution
The Java 3D API allows users to do high-end 3D visualization over the network regardless of their target platform, and requires very little tuning from platform to platform. It is a scene graph-based API which enables programmers utilizing the Java language to quickly and easily add 3D content to their applets and applications. In addition, because the Java 3D API utilizes low-level APIs such as the OpenGL® and Direct3D APIs, programmers are able to take advantage of the underlying hardware acceleration without having to program for specific platforms.
Nisbet's team is taking advantage of several of the functional benefits built into the Java 3D API, including:
- The scene graph -- The high-level, scene-graph model allows SAS developers to focus on objects and scene composition, freeing the programmer from complex coding procedures previously required;
- Dynamic object creation and removal -- This feature is useful for large datasets, when developers start with a simple chart and explore data on the fly. Rather than requiring SAS engineers to start over, the Java 3D API eases the process by allowing them to simply add new nodes;
- Morphing -- The Java 3D API will allow SAS customers to animate otherwise static data, creating visually interesting information that is easier to understand;
- The Swing User Interface -- Java 3D applications can use the
Swing components, which gives application programmers utilizing
Java technology world-class tools for building professional,
cutomizeable cross-platform GUIs.
- Rich libraries -- The Java programming language provides rich libraries of data structures which simplify sorting and picking, geometry manipulation, behaviors and environmental effects, as well as managing memory. This relieves developers from performing "grunt work", letting them concentrate on how to best enhance the data;
- Texture mapping -- Texture mapping is the application of a texture image to a 3D surface, which makes graphs for geologic and aerospace applications realistic and therefore more manageable.
Decision Support Applications Strengthened by Java 3D
With Sun's Java 3D API solution, SAS Institute plans to offer broader computing capabilities of major businesses around the globe. And according to Nisbet, it's only the beginning.
"The Java 3D API has the potential to be a very strategic direction for state- of-the-art graphics products. SAS Institute sees a huge number of computing platforms and applications on a daily basis and we've written for all types of graphics API's for our customers. None of them have the promise or high-level capability of the Java 3D API. It's easily the most affordable, portable, object-oriented API we've encountered," says Nisbet.
SAS Institute Inc.
SAS Campus Drive
Cary, NC 27513
(919) 677-8000
http://www.sas.com
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