A Visual Editor in Java for View

Abstract

In this project we continued the development of a visual editor in the Java programming language to create screens on which to display real-time data. The data comes from the numerous systems monitoring the operation of the space shuttle while on the ground and in space, and from the many tests of subsystems. The data can be displayed on any computer platform running a Java-enabled World Wide Web (WWW) browser and connected to the Internet. Previously a special-purpose program bad been written to display data on emulations of character-based display screens used for many years at NASA. The goal now is to display bit-mapped screens created by a visual editor. We report here on the visual editor that creates the display screens. This project continues the work we bad done previously. Previously we had followed the design of the 'beanbox,' a prototype visual editor created by Sun Microsystems. We abandoned this approach and implemented a prototype using a more direct approach. In addition, our prototype is based on newly released Java 2 graphical user interface (GUI) libraries. The result has been a visually more appealing appearance and a more robust application.