Web enabling - what it means
Web enabling is the art of constructing, adapting, or interfacing
software applications so that the user of the software only needs a browser
on the desktop.
Web enabling saves companies very large amounts of money in software
maintenance and hardware costs, and makes useful software available to many
more coworkers than ever before, thus improving the efficiency of their
work
Examples
Many technical and scientific software packages are only available for
non-Windows systems, and are deployed on Unix-workstations or
(mini-)supercomputers. Therefore they cannot be used in a distributed
environment (i.e. using the company's intranet).
(Scientific) software companies are reluctant to
make web-versions of their software available as selling individual licenses
is much more lucrative. Others offer client-server software and catch a
considerable amount of money for each client installation. This means that
chemical and pharmaceutical companies are faced with very high costs when
they want to make technical and scientific software available to a larger
group of coworkers.
In other cases, scientific and technical software, developed within a
chemical or pharmaceutical company has not been developed with the intranet
in mind. Usually these packages have been written in Fortran, C(++), or
Visual Basic, making it difficult or impossible to make the software
available to a larger community within the company (think about maintenance
and deployment costs of classic client-server systems, and distribution and
version control problems of PC-software).
As a specialist in web-enabling of (technical and scientific) software,
Computer Chemistry Consultancy can help you solving these problems, and make
the use of your technical or scientific software much more
cost-efficient.
Web-enabling has the following
advantages:
The software can in principle be started from any computer on the
company's intranet using a web-browser only
The cost for extra licenses of expensive
software is avoided as the software runs on one computer only (the
server).
If there are many users, one multi-processor computer can replace
many local workstations, leading to cost reduction.
The use of the software can be extended to
much more people than ever before. See also our achievements.
- Validation of software (required by
regulatory authorities) is considerably more easy for web-enabled
software.
Web enabling of (technical and scientific) software
can be done in several ways. Computer Chemistry provides following
services:
Translation of software written in Fortran, Visual Basic or C(++)
into Java, deployment on the intranet
Implementation of algorithms in Java
applets or servlets (from scratch)
web-enabled implementation of methods described in scientific or
technical articles
Interfacing with databases
Development of web-interfaces for existing packages running on
Unix-workstations or supercomputers
Development of "Web-Wizards", so that
non-specialists can perform standard-calculations through the
intranet.
Techniques we use for web-enabling and which we are
experts in:
There are however also a lot of new technologies, mature or emerging, that
rapidly gain their place in chemical and pharmaceutical applications. These
technologies are build on top of Java, and make it possible to develop
applications more rapidly, more secure and with much more functionality than
ever before.
We use the following of them in the applications we build:
Computer Chemistry Consultancy, June 2001
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