Abstract

We describe the specification, design, deployment, and implementation of a three-dimensional plotting utility based on a client-server distributed computing model. This plotter provides a World Wide Web environment enabling the user to get 3-D colored curves from mathematical expressions. The utility provides an intuitive look-and-feel user interface. Users do not have to acquire extra knowledge to use it. The utility is reliable, portable and extensible. In this report, we discuss the project motivation. We compare three popular Java middleware technologies to show why we chose Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) technology. Java Native Interface (JNI) technology and Java 3 Dimension Application Interface (3-D API) is also described. We discuss the advantage of the reuse component model, and demonstrate how to reuse an object-oriented model (C++ parser model) in a Java program. Finally, we provide a short conclusion and discuss the future perspective and improvement of this utility.