 |
 |
|
|
|
We have developed some graphics XML Web Services.
These are aimed purely towards developers wishing to embed graphics capabilities within
their own applications.
There are four Web Services that are commercially available, and would be of value to
any company involved in any type of web page development, web authoring, e-store,
shop-building or other online (web based or desktop) web or graphics solutions.
• Background
• 3D Heading Generator
• 2D Graphics Generator
• NavBar Generator
• Photo Processing Service
• Free Trial Web Services
• Prices
• Term & Conditions
It's important for all businesses and all web authors to present a professional
looking website to the world. This inevitably means graphics will be involved, and
yet the ability to create customized graphic images is a difficult and skilled job. It
requires not only an artistic ability but also a deep understanding of graphics
technology such as image types, anti-aliasing, color reduction, palette optimisation,
image compression and more.
The graphic rendering engines that actually create the graphics are highly complex
and very specialized programs. A relatively small number of well known companies
have developed advanced rendering engines that are incorporated in programs such as
Adobe Illustrator, Corel DRAW etc. Xara has developed its own rendering engines over
the last 10 years and owns probably the most advanced and certainly the highest
performance graphics rendering engines in the world today.
By making the core engine available as an XML Web Service now any developer can easily
incorporate customized graphics into their own product. This is particularly useful for
products such as web authoring tools where the goal of the product is to create good
looking websites. Web Authoring software can now provide an easy automatic alternative
to many existing solutions because they provide little help for the web author in
creating good looking customized graphics.
The Xara Graphics Web Services not only provide programmatic access to the Xara rendering
engine, but also provide a means by which anybody can create their own high quality
customized graphics without needing to be an artist or illustrator. And because these
are provided as hosted XML Web Services there is no need to purchase, download, install
or configure large and complex software products.
Xara offer four separate Graphics Web Services;
Back to top
| Rather than taking hundreds of separate parameters to define a full 3D scene, this Web
Service provides a large range of pre-created template designs and then accepts a limited
number of additional parameters to customize the image. |
 |
 |
For example you can customize the font, lighting colors and shadow. The Web Service
returns a color reduced, palette optimized, transparent PNG, GIF or JPEG image. It can also
create very compact animated GIF images. |
| This is ideal for creating dramatic 3D textual headings or 'latest news' type of animations
to stand out. |
 |
Back to top
| Based on the Xara vector rendering engine this Web Service takes a pre-existing template
master design and then a number of simple parameters, such as font, colors and of course
text to produce a high quality customized graphic image. |
 |
 |
You can select the format of the Web Service output to be either a PNG, GIF or JPEG and
can control the quality / compression settings. The Web Service call should take under a
second to complete. |
This service can produce an almost unlimited range of basic web graphics such as headings,
captions, buttons, dividers, logos and more. Many hundreds of pre-created designs are
available (but unlike clipart which is fixed and inflexible, these you can customize
in so many ways this system can produce a near infinite range of graphics). This service
includes a unique ability to automatically scale any graphics design to accommodate any
required text without distorting the proportions of the graphic.
New master designs can be created by clients of this Web Service, by creating a vector
file in Xara X, Xara's professional illustration tool (which is compatible with vector
graphics created in Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand).
Back to top
| The most advanced of the graphic generator services, this produces a highly compact
interactive (mouse-over) button bar for use on websites. |
 |
 |
This Web Service takes a template style, a list of parameters such as the text for each
button, the link URL, font, colour and other parameters and returns all the component parts
needed for a graphical mouse-over navigation bar. All the images are color optimized, palette
reduced PNG or GIF or JPEG images. It also returns the required Javascript code to enable the
mouse-over highlighting function and self-highlighting of the button on the current page.
Unlike Flash graphics this solution is more compact, universally compatible with all browsers
and includes unique features such as automatic button scaling to accommodate any text
(without distorting the aspect ratio). |
These services are based on the Xara vector rendering technology that is typically many
times faster, and more powerful than alternatives. All graphic images are
fully anti-aliased with any background color to provide the highest quality professional
looking graphics with seamless integration into any website. Because the graphics technology
is vector based image quality is retained no matter how large the images are.
Theme sets
Xara can provide access to complete themed sets of graphics to make it easy for you or
your customers to offer professional looking websites where the whole page or even multiple
pages can have a common thematic design.
Back to top
| This Web Service takes an image (PNG, GIF or JPEG format) and allows a range of common
image processing functions to be performed, including brightness, contrast, gamma,
sharpening, blurring, color saturation, contoning, color tinting, anti-aliased re-scaling
and rotation, using Xara rendering engines (hand optimised assembly language) for
maximum performance. For extra performance it can combine any or all of the above
functions into a one-pass rendering process so that customers can apply one or more
processes without having to repeatedly call the Web Service. It returns the image in
PNG, GIF or JPEG format. |
 |
 |
This service can be used in many different ways, for example it could be used to process
uploaded product photographs to be a fixed size or size-optimized. It could be used to
provide a complete online photo editing service. The Xara Online SmartPhoto Module is an
example of a service built on this technology. |
Back to top
We have fully operational free trial versions of two of the above Web Services to enable
developers to experiment and test calling the services. These web pages also contain
example scripts ASP and VB as well as DLL for encoding and decoding base64 images
(although there are others available that do the same job)
NavBar Generator - http://ws.xara.com/navbar/soap/info.asp
This free service has a limited range of template styles and applies a small ad to
each bar. The commercials service does not have these restrictions.
3D Graphic Generator - http://ws.xara.com/graphicrender/soap/render3d/info.asp
This has a restricted set of 3D styles. A far larger range is available from the
commercial version of the service. New 3D template styles can be generated with Xara
3D (please link to the Xara 3D home page on the Xara site)
Back to top
All Xara Web Services are supplied solely on a hosted basis from our server farm
at our Network Operation Centre. All Web Services are accessed by our simple SOAP,
XML based interface. The license fee provides unlimited access to each rendering
service. There are no per-image charges.
The licence fee is split into 3 parts:
1) A monthly / annual fee per service for the license to use
2) A monthly / annual fee per server hosted
3) A set-up charge to configure an entry point to our servers for each customer
A possible extra charge:
4) A bandwidth charge if it goes over a certain limit
| Licencing Fees |
Monthly |
Yearly |
3D Heading Generator
2D
Graphics Generator
Navbar Generator
Photo Processing
Service |
$400
$500
$650
$250 |
$4000
$5000
$6500
$2500 |
Server fee: $1000 per month per server. (Dual processor, RAID5, backed-up,
Win2K etc)
Set-up fee: $500 per customer wanting to access the service (each customer gets a
unique access URL)
Back to top
The Web Services cannot be used to provide products that compete with Xara's existing
online or desktop products without our written permission.
One license is required for each separate customer. It's not possible to share licences
across different companies.
We reserve the right to charge additional bandwidth usage charges if the bandwidth
requirements go over 500Kbit per sec (approx 120G transfer per month). As a rough
guide 120Gbyte transfer should be enough to return approximately 300 images per minute,
which is >400,000 images per 24 hours.
Being a hosted service we provide 24x7 service monitoring and a guaranteed 99.9%
uptime SLA.
Please contact sales@xara.com if you are interested in using any of the above
services or if you have any further questions about the services.
Back to top
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
