Object Technology Licensing Corporation

International Business Machines Corporation

Taligent, Inc.

Rajiv Jain

John W Peterson

Radhakrishna Aditham

Muralidharan Srinivasan

Robert Seidl

E U Sudhakaran

John M Peterson

Richard D Webb

Maire L Howard

Arthur W Cabral

A collaborative session is represented by a session object which receives all messages generated by the programs and transmits the messages to all programs participating in the session. The session object can include shared objects which are managed by the session and can be updated without requiring messages to be transmitted over a network. Accordingly, programs may enter a session after it begins and immediately access common session information, such as a state database.

Collaborative framework with shared objects

A collaborative application framework is used to build application programs which communicate with a central collaboration manager by means of a predetermined protocol. The predetermined protocol allows converters to be located at the collaboration manager site so that the programs neither include, nor require, preconfigured converters. Accordingly, new programs may easily and inexpensively be added to the system. The framework includes class code information which is incorporated into each application program by subclassing and which allows the program to communicate with the central manager by passing messages. The framework further includes class code for creating in the central manager a session object which receives a first message from a first program, converts the information in the first message into an information format utilized by a second program and forward a second messages to the second program containing information in the appropriate format. Since the converting mechanism is a part of a session object, it is not incorporated into first and second programs.

Collaborative framework for disparate application programs

A computer method draws overlapped two-dimensional shapes and two-dimensional projections of three-dimensional shapes onto a projection plane in a system of world coordinates X,Y,Z. The method instantiates a plurality of two-dimensional geometry class objects, each of which includes an order attribute specifying an overlapped position for depicting a corresponding two-dimensional shape on a projection plane positioned orthogonally to the Z coordinate of the world coordinate system. The method instantiates a three-dimensional geometry class object including a Z-value for a position along the Z world coordinate of the three-dimensional shape. The method sorts the plurality of two-dimensional geometry class objects by their respective order attributes in a sorting table in the memory. The method sorts the three-dimensional geometry class object by its Z-value in the sorting table and orders it in a composite order with the two-dimensional class objects in the sorting table. The method then draws the two-dimensional shapes and two-dimensional projections of the three-dimensional shapes onto the projection plane in the composite order of the sorting table, to depict an overlapped appearance of the shapes.

Object oriented method and system to draw 2D and 3D shapes onto a projection plane

A graphics system enables an automatic choice between existing host rendering programs, existing hardware acceleration methods, and enhanced software acceleration programs for rendering graphic primitives. The graphics system accesses the speed and accuracy characterizations of a hardware accelerator attached to the system. Then, for each graphics primitive available from the enhanced software acceleration programs, the graphics system invention compares the speed and accuracy of the attached hardware accelerator with that of the enhanced software acceleration programs. The graphics system invention then selects which graphics primitives should be rendered by the enhanced software acceleration programs and which graphics primitives should be rendered by the attached hardware accelerator.

Graphics hardware acceleration method, computer program, and system

In a colloboration system which allows a plurality of programs to interact, each program registers an 'interest' in messages with a session object. The session object, which represents the colloboration session and acts as a collaboration manager, receives all messages but broadcasts a received message only to those programs which have registered an interest in the message. In one embodiment, a colloborative application framework is used to build both the session object and the application programs. The framework includes class code information which is incorporated into each application program by subclassing and which allows each program to communicate with the session object through a predetermined protocol.

Interest-based collaborative framework

A method for rendering two-dimensional shapes and two-dimensional projections of three-dimensional shapes on a projection plane uses a sorting table to determine which shapes overlap other shapes. For each two-dimensional shape, the shorting table includes an order attribute specifying the front to back ordering of the two-dimensional shapes on the projection plane. For each three-dimensional shape the sorting table includes a Z-value specifying a position along a coordinate perpendicular to the projection plane. The position specified is dependent on whether the three-dimensional shape is perceived to be in front of the projection plane or behind the projection plane. The values in the sorting table are sorted to produce a composite ordering of the shapes and a drawing is created by sequentially rendering each shape in the composite order of the sorting table to depict an overlapped appearance of the shapes.

Method and system using a sorting table to order 2D shapes and 2D

A method and system provides an object-oriented framework for rendering three-dimensional surfaces on a two-dimensional display in a flexible manner. The framework comprises two main classes that work together to render discretized data points that represent the three-dimensional graphic objects. The first class is used to construct a surface object which has a first member function that generates vertex information for each of the data points and stores the vertex information in a memory. The surface object also contains a second member function which generates indices into the stored vertex information which indices define shards on the surface which is being rendered. The second class is used to construct a rendering object which calls the first and second member functions in the surface object to first process the vertex data for display and then use the shard indices to retrieve the processed vertex data to render the surface. Vertex data processing is separated from shard processing to increase the efficiency of the rendering process.

Object-oriented method and apparatus for rendering a 3D surface image on

A method and apparatus for defining customizable pick, hit or find detection criteria for geometric types and using the results of the search as a basis for determining whether to perform an action. According to the inventive method, a search protocol is defined for geometric types. The search criteria is compared with graphic objects to determine whether the object matches the criteria. Based on the results of the comparison, an output is produced. In addition to allowing customized hit criteria for primitive geometric types, the hit object framework allows hit criteria to be specified for geometric types created by the application developer.

Object-oriented system for selecting a graphic image on a display

An object-oriented graphic system is disclosed including a processor with an attached display, storage and object-oriented operating system. The graphic system builds a component object in the storage of the processor for managing graphic processing. The processor includes an object for connecting one or more graphic devices to various objects responsible for tasks such as graphic accelerators, frame buffers, page description languages and vector engines. The system is fully extensible and includes polymorphic processing built into each of the support objects.

Growing community of inventors

San Jose, CA, United States of America

Rajiv Jain