Porting SHARPE on the WEB: Design and implementation of a network computing platform using JAVA

Although on the one hand the Web has made a large amount of information easy to access for a great number of users, on the other it does not offer any simple mechanisms to facilitate the use of a calculation application on the Internet. Recently, however, Java has been developed, a new language defined by Sun whose features make it ideal for the development of network applications. In this paper we show how it is possible to use this technology to create a network computing platform for the Web sharing of applications which were not specifically devised for network use. The platform developed is also equipped with adequate security mechanisms which provide authentication services and, if required encryption. The approach proposed has been applied to porting the Sharpe tool (Symbolic Hierarchical Automated Reliability/Performance Evaluator) onto the Web.