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New Toys for a New Millennium

© Adam Hughes

The sun is about to dawn on a new millennium (yes, this coming January 1, not Y2K, will be the true milestone), so what better way to kick things off than to look at some of the newer technologies that will affect scientific computing in the months and years ahead. After this week's tour of some exciting toys from Sun, we'll get back on track next week and finish up our look at distributed scientific visualization.

Sun's web space is loaded with great information from top to bottom, but probably the most relevant area for computational scientists is the Java web page at http://java.sun.com As has been mentioned in this space many times before, Java technology is making it easier for more people to utilize computer resources to conduct their research. The most accessible way that this is happening is through the development of graphical user interfaces, or GUI's. Swing is an extension of Java that makes it relatively easy for scientists (and others) to develop GUI's that are simple to use, yet meet all the requirements for productive human-to -program interaction. A great place to start learning more about Swing is Sun's Swing tutorial at http://web2.java.sun.com/docs/books/tuto...

As web tools become more sophisticated and widely available, they are constantly being put into use in new and varied arenas. With the growing emphasis on distributed computing, scientific computing is certainly no exception to this rule. One utility that is particularly promising in this area is the Java servlet, along with the associated Java Server Pages (JSP's). A servlet allows the developer to use Java code to dynamically create HTML pages that can be viewed with just about any flavor of browser. This is similar in results to the ubiquitous CGI/Perl scripts in wide use on the internet today, but servlets are constructed with the rigor and benefits of the Java specification. A JSP is kind of a simpler version of a servlet, in which much of the underlying utility code is generated automatically for the developer. The JSP concept is similar to Microsoft's ASP. Sun's servlet and JSP information can be found at http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/...

Finally, while many view them strictly as tools of e-commerce, Enterprise Java Beans, or EJB's, may offer much to the forward-thinking computational scientist. The EJB handles much of the dirty work of a three-tiered architecture automatically, leaving the developer time and energy to devote to the specific logic of his application. As well, the tightly component-based nature of EJB's makes code development clean and efficient. To learn more about Java's EJB specification, see http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/...

So there you have them : several "new" tools that are

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