Senior Project - hotjava

The engineers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are interested in increasing the accessibility and maintainability of the thermophysics software. Their current FORTRAN library is used for all calculations. The problem with the existing software was that it was written in Delphi, a language foreign to most scientists at NIST. As the needs of the scientists change, so must the software and the user interface. The Delphi interface is problematic to this effort. The team proposed a solution to the problem that did not require re-writing the FORTRAN library and allowed for easy modification of the user interface.

hotjava is a Java-based front end to the NIST thermophysics FORTRAN library. A key component of the software is the ability to access the FORTRAN library from Java classes. hotjava solved this problem by using a C wrapper function that calls the FORTRAN DLL directly. The Java object responsible for calling the FORTRAN routines communicated through the C wrapper function by passing it the required information. The hotjava application has the same look and feel as the old system with the Delphi interface, thereby saving money associated with training scientists to learn a completely new system. The advantage of hotjava is that it is written in a more modern programming language and is therefore more accessible by a larger number of software engineers.