The Eighth ACM International Hypertext Conference

Southampton, UK
April 6-11, 1997


Untitled

Tutorial

Java for Web-based Application Deployment

Ian Smith, GVU Center, Georgia Tech

Duration:

Half day.

Abstract

There is a lot of hype today surrounding Java and the Web, but nobody believes in magic bullets. What are the real issues that need to be considered? This tutorial focuses on the real-world problems that need to be considered when developing applications for the Web. Below is a list of questions that participants in the tutorial should be able to answer after completing the tutorial:

Tutorial Summary

Objective: To provide attendees with an understanding of the possibilities provided by the World Wide Web for application deployment and a more detailed understanding of the issues involved in developing user interfaces for the Web in Java.

Content: The tutorial is broken into three sections, a brief introduction and overview, a discussion of the GUI issues in Java, and a short look at the future directions for Java applet development.

In the introductory section, the participants will learn a small amount about the history of Java and be involved in a discussion of how Java applets work within the context of Web servers and browsers.

In the middle section of the tutorial - the largest- participants will learn about the Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT)which is the mechanism by which graphical applications can be constructed in Java. In this section, the instructor will give a demo of using an interface builder to construct a simple Java applet. This demo will include a discussion of the capabilities of the current generation of interface construction tools for Java. The latter part of the GUI section gives participants an awareness of the potential problem areas when using AWT-based interfaces in a cross-platform environment.

In the final section of the tutorial, students will be exposed to where new technologies are emerging that could positively affect their ability to deliver Web applications. This section will include discussions of ideas such as connecting Java applets to databases and developing applets with higher level tools.

Who should attend:

User interface designers, developers, and managers with an interest in World Wide Web-based application technology. This tutorial presumes familiarity with using the Web as well as some familiarity with the process of using HTML to write Web pages. Although a programming background might be helpful in a couple of areas of the tutorial, it is not a requirement.

Instructor:

Ian Smith is a Ph.D. candidate in the Graphics, Visualization, and Usability Center in the College Of Computing at Georgia Tech; he also has spent time working on Java-related projects at JavaSoft, an operating company of Sun Microsystems and the developers of Java. His primary research interests are user interface software systems and multimedia. He is currently working on his Ph.D. dissertation in the area of media space toolkits and is expected to graduate in 1997. He has published academic papers on a variety of subjects including media spaces, cryptography, visualization, hypertext, signal processing, multimedia, and constraint systems in conferences such as CHI, ACM Multimedia, ACM Hypertext, ACM Conference On Organizational Computing Systems, ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, and the ACM Conference on User Interface Software and Technology.


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The conference organisers can be contacted at ht97info@ht97.soton.ac.uk