Java and WWW Server Project

Draft version

Purposes

The WWW serve technology of today allows powerfull interactive document and multimedia applications to be made available to a broad audience. Any reasonably up to date PC can be used to view neatly formatted text with medium resolution pictures through easy to use acces mechanisms, and even audio and video channels are available with reasonale quality.
Two main interest underly the activities that will be described on this page:

Making my bible translation efforts available, including the greek and hebrew.
Experimenting with www browsers as a programmers interface

The first is already in progress, but could be improved by using more advanced web technology, especially where communicating ground texts with comments are invloved. If in some way a server with sufficient (disc and processing) capacity could be be available, an usefull option could also be to make the hebrew and greek ground texts available in html form, interlinear with the english version, with some more work even in a word-wise form, and with ample editing (alson on user side) and commenting facilities. Linking this up with strongs annotated web-bible versions and automatically linking in the Perseus greek lexicon would make a very strong bible research site.

The second has my attention now, since many programming packages are becoming available on the web, and tend to be more and more oriented toward good (graphical) user interfaces. It makes sense to use available browser technolgy to interface with complex programming environments, since all the currently available UI components can be used through these browsers, in a fairly efficient and standardized fashion.

Currently done

Tcl/Tk Web Server

There is a web server availalble that is written entirely in Tcl/Tk, which makes it highly portable, run time accessible (debuggable) and highy extendable. On top of that is uses loew level built in tcl funtions to should make it also competitive in terms of efficiency. It is a compact, (thus far) well bahaved package that proved to [present no difficulties during the few days I've used it. What I especially liked is the facility to dynamically link in tcl functions for interactive page response. Oh, its freely available, and tcl/tk is highly portable. (more later)

Java

For about a day, I've been looking at the Java programming language and GUI in the netscape browser (or standalone). It proved no problem to compile some text window material capable of interacting with a dynamically generated tcl thread in the server.

I've quickly looked at some java supplied stuff and found a net-editor application (including relaxation mechanisms) which promises to be usefull as a (more general) net editor. The compiler soesn't seem extremely quick, and generates errors for missing code checks ( where are You Get What You Asked Fro unix/C days ?!), but works fine for some of the things I made.

This makes it possible to have a www based graphical programming language, dynamically simulated, and with lots of powerfull UI relatively easily available (especially when cominbed with the now available Tcl/Tk Netscape pluginand the 3D redenering capacities of the same).