[GRASS5] web grass

[Joan M Friedman]

Hi,

I've been lurking on this list, while I learn more about GRASS and gis
in general. It seems like it would be useful to have a web
application that can connect users with GRASS, and can connect with
other gis servers on the internet, and that it would be 
reasonable to write such an app in java. (I write software in java, I
have friends who've been asking for this sort of thing, and it
seems like an interesting, if somewhat overwhelming, project.) 

Here are a few questions, if you don't mind my asking (if you do mind,
of course, read no further):

Do you think this is a good/bad/terrible idea?
Would you be interested in assisting?

Suppose I have GRASS on a linux box, and user1 starts it. Then user2
starts it. Are there two
entirely separate instances of GRASS running, or is there one GRASS
'server' with 2 clients logged into it?

If I ran GRASS on a web server, after writing code to allow people to
use it through the web, 
would my web application have to start GRASS separately for every user? 

Thank you for your time considering this,
Joan 

-------------

Joan Friedman