The automotive industry demands visual support for the verification of the quality of their products from the design phase to the manufacturing phase. This implies the need of tools for measurement planning, programming measuring devices, managing measurement data, and the visual exploration of the measurement results. To improve the quality control throughout the whole process chain an integration of such tools in a platform independent framework is crucial. We present eMMA (enhanced Measure Management Application), a client/server system integrating measurement planning, data management, and straightforward as well as sophisticated visual exploration tools in a single framework.

The accelerating evolution of information visualization research in the last few years has led to several specific system implementations. The obvious drawbacks of this development are highly dependent software systems, which are only available for a restricted number of users. Today, due to the remarkable advances in hardware and software technologies, not only very expensive graphics workstations, but also low-cost PCs are capable of running computational demanding visualization systems. Furthermore, the rapid development of the medium World Wide Web along with state-of-the-art Internet programming techniques has led to a trend toward more generally usable visualization systems. In this paper, we propose a functional developer's framework for general Web-based visualization systems which makes intelligent use of application specific software and hardware components on the server side, as well as Java's benefits on the client side. To demonstrate the framework's abilities, we have applied it to two practical visualization tasks and report on our experience concerning practicability and pitfalls.