Increasing application accessibility through Java

Java has begun to open up new possibilities for accessing applications on the Web. With Java, developers can write applications as applets and insert them into Web pages. The user can then retrieve and execute them with local computing resources. We show how developers can use this feature to create a network computing platform that lets Web users share applications not specifically devised for network use, including those that are computationally intensive. With our approach, the network is not involved as long as the user executes operations on the graphical interface, which is executed locally on the client. Only when users require some computational response from the server do they need to access it. Access is straightforward; authorized users can access the application from any node connected with the Internet as long as they have a Java-enabled Web browser. We have used used one such network computing platform to port an existing tool and develop a new application.