Lessons learned from developing a prototype meteorological workstation with Java

Meteorological workstation systems focus on the needs of forecasters and scientists. Most of these systems can only be implemented on UNIX platforms. In order to supply lay people with individualized on-demand weather information, software needs to be developed that can easily run on any standard PC and that uses the Web to access weather data. Therefore, DWD and Fraunhofer IGD started to evaluate a solution that ensures high portability, high interactivity, ease of maintenance and the possibility to supply data over the Internet. These efforts resulted in a prototype meteorological workstation written in Java. This prototype runs on every platform for which a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is installed and that has access to the Internet. In addition, this software serves as a prototype to evaluate the usefulness of Java for DWD's next generation, meteorological workstation system.