Porting of an Existing Software From the Sun Workstations to A Personal Computer Environment

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to port an existing software component, which has been designed for Sun workstations, to a Personal Computer environment. The software component involves the access of remote objects through Java networking. The ported software was tested on various machines housing different file servers of the Oklahoma State University Computing and Information Services Department. A new user interface was developed for the ported software component and a number of enhanced features were introduced. The software worked fairly well on all of the test machines. The new feature (i.e., finding out the time taken to look for a remote server) resulted in a more user-informative environment. Other user friendly features such as information about the current server, the reset feature, and the option of returning to the default server were also introduced. The amount of time taken to look for a method located on a specified server is more when the server is searched for the first time compared to the time taken to relocate the same server. This can be attributed to the Registry mechanism of Java, which is like a simple register containing the information of all the successfully located servers. This mechanism makes a record of all the servers that are accessed, and every lookup for a remote server is first searched across the registry. Thus, it reduces the total lookup time for already accessed servers.