INTERNET TECHNOLOGY IN MAGNETIC-RESONANCE - A COMMON GATEWAY INTERFACE PROGRAM FOR THE WORLD-WIDE-WEB NMR SPECTROMETER

A custom-written Common Gateway Interface (CGI) program for remote con trol of an NMR spectrometer using a World Wide Web browser has been de scribed. The program, running on a UNIX workstation, uses multiple pro cesses to handle concurrent tasks of interacting with the user and wit h the spectrometer. The program's parent process communicates with the browser and sends out commands to the spectrometer; the child process is mainly responsible for data acquisition. Communication between the processes is via the shared memory mechanism. The WWW pages that have been developed for the system make use of the frames feature of web b rowsers. The CGI program provides an intuitive user interface to the N MR spectrometer, making, in effect, a complex system an easy-to-use We b appliance. (C) 1998 Academic Press.