The focus of our research and development is the creation of a web-based C++ software package that numerically models viscoelastic flow in polymer processing. In order to design software that best satisfies the needs of fiber and film process modelers in industry and academia, the following capabilities must be included:(1) multi-scale simulation, from molecular through continuum levels, taking into account length and time scales which vary by several orders of magnitude, (2) accurate three dimensional simulations that can only be achieved on massively parallel computing platforms, (3) monitoring of the simulation during each of the stages using a variety of 2D and 3D visualization tools, and (4) a user-friendly web-based interface (Java Applet).

To integrate these components we have designed a highly distributed object-oriented system that exploits the power and expressivity of the Extensible Markup Language, XML, Extensible Style Language, XSL, and the XSL transformations, XSLT, to provide a uniform interface for graphical representation of data. We use Java to build the web-based graphical user interface, which allows easy interaction with our software. To make our system highly distributed we take advantage of Java servlets, which enables simple access to the code via the Internet.

We also discuss a proof-of-concept project that involves creating a web-based graphical user interface written in Java to run FORTRAN legacy code. To achieve this interoperability, we place a C-language wrapper around the FORTRAN code and then create a Java servlet that enables the Java Native Interface (JNI) to interact with the C code. The user interface runs the FORTRAN code through this servlet.