The Web as a graphical user interface


next up previous
Next: How to avoid CGI programming
Up: The motivation: economic models on the Weband dynamic
Previous: The motivation: economic models on the Weband dynamic

The Web as a graphical user interface

Although these models are available to the public, and will be followed by others, we also intend to use the Web as our standard in-house interface. Most IFS models are written in Modula-2, run on IBM PC-compatible machines under Windows and OS/2, and have an old-fashioned user-interface built around a home-grown menu system. If this could be replaced by an interface to the Web, then anyone with a Web browser could run the models, regardless of the machine they were using. This would save writing a new graphical user interface, and would avoid restricting the models to, say, only X-Windows or Windows-95 platforms. The big difference between this and a standard windowing interface is that the models would be running on the Web server machine: the Web server software would receive data sent from the browser and transmit it to the model, which would process it and send results back to the server, presumably as HTML. The server would in turn pass them back to the client. Such in-house use - the Web as an ``intranet'' - is now apparently quite popular.



Jocelyn Ireson-Paine
Sat Oct 12 23:35:52 BST 1996