Sneak Peek at Our First HTML5 Toolkit...

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the new features of HTML5 in general and spoke briefly about what we had planned for HTML5. Today, I had a chance to play with the new toolkit and was pleasantly surprised at the amount of features our engineers have packed into it. There is some exciting stuff happening at LEAD for document and medical imaging developers looking to create zero footprint web applications.

The foundation for what's coming is a zero footprint, HTML5 / JavaScript image viewer. Just like our current LEADTOOLS interfaces such as .NET, C++, Silverlight, etc., it will support several interactive modes (magnify glass, pan, zoom), image processing effects (flip, reverse, rotate) and annotations (arrow, rectangle, ellipse, ruler, text). The great thing about HTML5 applications is their ability to provide the same user experience across any HTML5 capable browser including desktops, tablets and mobile phones. All of these interactive features and annotations work flawlessly with both mouse and touchscreen gestures. I tested our viewer on an iPad, iPhone and several Android devices and it worked flawlessly on each.

There is a lot more to the new toolkit than just a viewer. Our engineers have also ported many of our SOAP and WCF services to RESTful Web Services to make it easy to use with JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). Therefore, virtually every LEADTOOLS feature and technology can communicate with the HTML5 viewer and still provide a zero footprint deployment. For example, the viewer natively supports browser formats like JPEG, GIF and PNG. By using our new image formats web service, I was able to display any format LEADTOOLS supports such as PDF, TIFF, DOC, JPEG2000 and many others. LEADTOOLS web services will also provide support for OCR, Barcode Recognition and advanced image processing, thus opening up a wide range of development opportunities for programmers wanting to create zero footprint web applications.

Developers targeting the medical industry will find that our HTML5 toolkit bridges the gap between mobile devices and PACS. The new toolkit will be perfect for on-the-fly DICOM image viewing and processing. Because of the HTML5 viewer and web services, I was able to display DICOM images with client-side window leveling, series stack and DICOM metadata in the latest IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari on my desktop. Again, the real selling point is mobile device support, as my Android tablet, iPad, and iPhone (ok, I'm a mobile device junkie...) all displayed and window leveled DICOM images quickly and accurately over WiFi.

I hope you guys are getting as excited about this as I am. From what our engineering department has told me, it should be available next week!

UPDATE: These products are now available!

Thanks,
Otis Goodwin