GRASS monitor in Java?

[Simon Cox]

Martin Ameskamp wrote:
> 
> I've been thinking of GIS and the Internet recently ... should make
> it fairly easy to write a new GRASS monitor as a Java applet ...

Martin - nice idea - maybe this is a fortunate legacy of the 
rather old-fashioned Grass monitor architecture (the legacy 
that forced the clumsy fifo X implementation).  
However, before you go too far, bear in mind that a number of 
interoperability efforts (eg OGIS - itself with its origins 
firmly in the Grass camp!) should make platform specific 
solutions less and less appropriate.  

> Before I delve into this, I'd like to know whether anybody's been
> there already? I'm aware of at least two projects involving the net
> and GRASS (GRASSLinks and GRASS Lite using CGI), but I haven't come
> across any Java monitors.

In GRASSLinks, for example, 
(see http://www.ned.dem.csiro.au/AGCRC/4dgm )
my recent tinkerings have mainly 
been aimed at isolating the Grass-specific components more 
and more so that Grass acts primarily as the database server - 
the analysis and some of the graphics now use non-Grass 
components.  In due course then Grass could be replaced as 
the database server quite simply, or data might be retrieved 
from other databases (possibly over the web) as well.  

I'd rather see WWW platform efforts aimed at a more generic 
multiple layer display-and-query capability with a well 
defined interface that could then be attached to a variety of 
data servers.  In this context, we are planning on moving to 
a more general visualisation system including both image and 3D 
to display data sourced from a variety of sources, including a 
GRASS database.  Our current intention would be to use VRML 
extensively for graphics.  (VRML and Java are supposed to be 
working better together in the future, though Sun have recently 
proposed their own graphics extensions to Java.)  This also 
builds on a "universal" data-model framework that we have been 
working on for a while now.  For more information, check out
http://www.ned.dem.csiro.au/DMGE/
-- 
__________________________________________________
Dr Simon Cox - Australian Geodynamics Cooperative Research Centre
CSIRO Exploration & Mining, PO Box 437, Nedlands, WA 6009 Australia
T:  +61 8 9389 8421   F:  +61 8 9389 1906   simon at ned.dem.csiro.au
http://www.ned.dem.csiro.au/CoxSimon/