Z on the Web using Java

• Student project (1997-98) by David Chippington, supervised by Jonathan Bowen.

• Screen shots of ZDisplay applet (see also Mediatracker version) and ZCreator program.

• Birthday Book Z example. See also Mediatracker version.

• ZDisplay Java applet source code. See also Mediatracker version.

• Z symbol images in GIF format.

• Final Report (large - 166Kbytes).

• Example Z specification using HTML and GIF images alone.

• Proposed extensions in HTML for Z - links to other related resources.

• ZUM'98 conference (Berlin, Germany, 24-26 September, 1998), where a paper entitled Z on the Web using Java by Jonathan Bowen and David Chippington will be presented.

• Related work on implementing displets by Fabio Vitali et al, also to be presented at ZUM'98 as Visualizing Z Notation in HTML Documents by Prof. Paolo Ciancarini, Cecilia Mascolo and Fabio Vitali. See examples, including Spivey's Birthday Book.

Problems:

• Invocation of the ZDisplay Java applet is slow, mainly due to the loading of images for symbols. This needs considerable improvement for practical use.
• Output of Java applets is not printable directly. This is a general problem with Java applets.
• Hyperlinks are not included at present. These would be very useful for traversal of larger specifications.
• Conversion to/from other formats (e.g., L^_AT^_EX) would be desirable. The ZCreator program could be modified to do this.
• Greater compatibility with the Z Interchange Format would be desirable.

In the future XML (Extensible Markup Language - an SGML - Standard Generalized Markup Language - subset designed for ease of use on the Internet) and/or MathML (to aid the display of mathematics, based on XML), together with tools like the Amaya browser/editor (all from the World Wide Web Consortium - W3C) could make the display of Z specification within Web browsers much easier.