GRASS monitor in Java?

[Martin Ameskamp]

Hi there,

I've been thinking of GIS and the Internet recently (along with 
millions of other people, I guess...) in the context of writing a demo 
version of my PhD project (3D soil modelling, see 
http://www.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~ma/trcs/thesis.html). This project 
is heavvily based on interaction with a GRASS monitor, and it has 
occurred to me that the communication between GRASS programs (d.rast 
etc) and the monitor through the interface of named pipes should make 
it fairly easy to write a new GRASS monitor as a Java applet (maybe 
with a little C daemon that sits on top of the pipes on the server 
machine and converts information into something palatable to the Java 
monitor) (rather long sentence, this...).

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.

I don't want to bring the whole of GRASS to the net, but I'd rather 
like to make some selected functions available with a minimum of 
effort. Comments welcome,

Martin
--
Dr. Martin Ameskamp, Inst. f. Informatik I (Computing Dept.)
Kiel University, Olshausenstr. 40, 24118 Kiel, Germany
Fax: ++49 431 8804054, Voice: ++49 431 8804474, 
ma at informatik.uni-kiel.de, URL http://www.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~ma/