Virtual environment for fast development of distributed measurement applications

This paper deals with a virtual environment that allows automatic measurement systems to be easily developed by accessing programmable instrumentation, which can be located either in a local or in a remote laboratory. The environment, which is based on a client-server application that runs on a single personal computer or over the Internet, is designed to hide most of the details connected to the setup of a complex measurement system to the users. Client and server applications have been developed in Java(trade mark) language so that they can be used on different platforms and are easily extensible to accommodate new processing tasks, interfaces, and instruments.