WWW-access and JAVA output

Following the world tendence of the telecomunication development we prepared the WWW homepage of the CATS (http://www.ratan.sao.ru or http://cats.sao.ru), producing all operations permitted in usual scripts.

We were guided by the following rules of preparation of html-pages and forms:

• possibility of image-less and table-less (for Lynx program) operation;
• to forsee the simple procedure (shell script) for the forms and references generation when we increase tha database and add corresponding records to the mentioned file of descriptors; this procedure can be executed by the every user of the CATS;
• the interface of connection of forms and CGI-software is based on the POST method and on the exchange between programs via values of the evironment variables. It allowed us to provide sufficient speed of interaction of parents' programs and generated their hetregeneous childs (shell scripst, C, F77, JAVA) by the common standard method.

The window of the CATS search page is shown in Fig.2

One of problems we met is output of graphics information, which is solved by output in PostScript compressed files. However, it is not very fast for a user, and decision is connected with output in GIF-format and in JAVA language. Concerning JAVA, the platform independent language, we suppose to use JAVA sripts both in preparion of flexible forms and in generation of the CATS graphics, including curves of energy distributions (e.g. radio spectra) and statitiscics curves of the CATS search.