Efficient development of a web‐based environmental testing system using a novel two‐layer software architecture

Abstract

AbstractThis work proposes a two‐layer software architecture and design considerations for the efficient development of a Web‐based environmental testing system. The efficiency of developing such a system can be significantly improved since the upper layer, called the Web application, can immediately employ the uniform interface and follow the call flow provided in the lower layer, called the COM component. The COM component particularly addresses the integration of various instrument control mechanisms and the concurrency issue, while the Web application addresses database, security, modularity, and graphic user interface (GUI) issues. Moreover, based on the proposed software architecture and design considerations, a Web‐based environmental testing system, called the Web‐based Automatic Measurement System (Web AMS), is developed to validate the efficiency of this architecture and address the above issues. The proposed synchronization mechanism, not only enables many experiments to share one Digital Multi‐Meter (DMM) simultaneously, but also allows many remote clients to monitor the status of operating devices in a progressing experiment concurrently. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 17: 412–421, 2009; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com); DOI 10.1002/cae.20238