Virtual environment for fast development of distributed measurement applications

This paper deals with a virtual environment that allows automatic measurement systems to be easily developed by accessing programmable instrumentation, which can be located either in a local or in a remote laboratory. The environment, which is based on a client-server application that runs on a single personal computer or over the Internet, is designed to hide most of the details connected to the setup of a complex measurement system to the users. Client and server applications have been developed in Java/spl trade/ language so that they can be used on different platforms and are easily extensible to accommodate new processing tasks, interfaces, and instruments.