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Hi everyone. My name is James Macgill and I'm the author of the demo under discussion. Humphrey has just allerted me to this discussion and asked me to join the list and take part. I'll quickly go though some of the points that have been raised so far in a couple of e.mails. On Thu, 14 Mar 2002 10:42:38 +0000, Trevor Lockwood <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >The trial page has just taken me 2 minutes 36 seconds to download using an >ISDN line, admittedly one linked to BT. That is clearly not acceptable. >Such Java driven sites all suffer from the same problem, the University of >Wales Colloquia programme a year or so ago faced similar challenges, and we >were reluctantly unable to use what would have been a useful system. First off, the demo was a concept pilot to explore some ideas about how geography could be used to explore the BL's collections. It was built for interal consultation to run on known equipment and known download speeds. At the end of the development a cut-down version was posted of the demo almost 'as-is'. The speed is poor, but then so far little to no effort has been put into addressing that. For example, the world outline is an 800k shapefile that is totaly inapropriate for low bandwidth use. >In Humphrey's terms we may all be using seriously obsolete browsers. My >department at Sussex has many machines running W95 on 333 machines, and >within our international education network we know of many countries where >old 286 machines are the only means of online communication. I'm no sure >what current hardware statistics are suggesting but I doubt whether it has >moved beyond IE4, and remember that's within the so-called developed world. > >There must be another way. Indeed there are, or at least, there are a number of alternative ways. The geotools library can be used entierly on the server side so that the browser needs to have no capability over being able to show a gif, though a little javascript does help. A full example of this can be seen on the us national weather service which uses GeoTools on the server only. http://www.weather.gov In my view final system should be able to take advantage of high bandwidth and modern browsers where posible whilst having a fall back to a less interactive but faster alternative for low end environments I'll read the other posts and respond shortly. All the best James p.s. A better idea of what the full demo looked like withe the base maps enabled can be found at: http://www.geotools.org/modules.php? op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=20&mode=&order=0