Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A 412 (1998) 140 —145 Remote monitoring over the Internet M.P. de Albuquerque*, E. Lelie`vre-Berna Institut Laue Langevin, BP 156, 38042 Grenoble Cedex 9, France Received 12 September 1997; received in revised form 1 December 1997 Abstract We present a simple Java client—server application for remote monitoring over the Internet which is instrument and platform independent. User-friendly and fully interactive remote monitoring graphical user interfaces dedicated to instruments might easily be developed and connected to this server. The example of the polarised neutron diffractometer D3 is presented. This client—server application is very easy to install, and the authors expect to distribute and maintain it.  1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PACS: 07.05.-t; 07.05.WR Keywords: Distributed environments; Remote monitoring 1. Introduction The recent fusion of computers and new network communication tools improves the scientific productivity, and most of the new projects try to develop systems which integrate distributed envi- ronments. Some of these systems, defined as collab- oratories, are integrating these new technologies to support scientific collaboration [1]. The goal is to provide a widely distributed environment in which people, instrument, and information can interact easily. In the near future, the scientific community should benefit from the advanced information in- * Corresponding author. E-mail: albuquer@ill.fr.  Permanently affiliated to Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Fı´sicas, Rio de Janeiro, 22290-180, Brazil. frastructure. The barriers of distance will break down, permitting natural and frequent participa- tion by researchers in planning, developing and performing shared projects. The collaboratory en- vironments must provide location-independent re- mote access to instruments, data handling, analysis resources and researchers in collaborations. An in- teresting review of a large number of collaboratory technologies may be found in papers [2,3]. One year ago, at the Institut Laue Langevin (ILL), people from the Computing for Science group (CS) [4,5] and from the Science division (the authors) started the BARNS project (BARNS Ap- plication to Run Networked Solutions). At first, the goal was to define the basics of a new collaboratory environment for ILL Users. Two complementary tools have been developed. The first controls the Users’ access to experimental data and to their files 0168-9002/98/$19.00  1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 1 6 8 - 9 0 0 2 ( 9 8 ) 0 0 2 9 4 - 0