Damage control and log taking JAVA applications for shipboard wireless LANs
Abstract
Damage control communications and watchstander log taking practices need to be improved for onboard submarines and ships. Currently, damage control rely on a slow, error prone process involving sound powered telephone talkers and grease pencil annotated white board. Also log taking practice suffers from similar problems. Logs are taken on paper forms, corrected daily, and filed in cabinets. Wireless network and mobile computing devices can be a solution to improve the efficiency of these practices along with some others. In this thesis, a distributed Java prototype software is developed to utilize the benefit of an onboard Intranet utilizing wireless LANs and pen based handheld computers. For both practice areas, data could be entered into a handheld computer and then wirelessly transmitted to a database server. Those data can be used by powerful main platforms and different supervisors can reach it any time in parallel. An applet and a servlet program modules are created to provide small, user friendly, platform independent electronic forms. Since handheld computers have some limitations like screen dimensions, computing power, and Java Virtual Machine, features of these software approaches are tested on a few different handheld computers to find the best software approach and computer product.