U.S. Dept of Commerce/NOAA/PMEL/EPIC 

 EPIC Data Selection 

• General:

  Be aware that this applet comprises of ~52K of bytecode in 19 class files. Depending on your connection downloading might take a long time, let alone having the Java interpreter build the frame once all files are present.

  The frame is set to an initial size of 620x740 which might be bigger than your screen size. Resizing the frame _should_ work fine, however, I cannot warrant for platform specific problems (see also below). The ScrollFrame class I'm using here was designed to have scrollbars appear if the frame gets resized to a size smaller than needed by the applet. Again, this might or might not work depending on your platform. (My Scrollframe class definitely needs some improvement. If some sympathetic soul out there could point me to a better working class I'd be most greatful. Here is my source of ScrollFrame.java for discussion).

• Platform specific:

  Unfortunately, I only have access to Solaris(tm) and Windows95(tm) machines and, thus, have to limit this section to these two platforms. If somebody can send me a report for other systems I'll include them in this list.

  • Solaris: In general, the applet seems to work fine here. Scrolling the frame (when resized to small size) shows a most annoying flicker. This might be attributed though, to my implementation of scrolling (see also above).
  • Windows95 (using Netscape2.01): Gosh, where do I begin? The AWT implementation on Windows95 seems to have so many glitches which renders this applet practically unusable.
    (a) The map gets drawn anywhere but where it is supposed to be. This also affects the rubber band rectangle that a mouse-drag operation draws. (Surprisingly, clearing the (Netscape-)caches and reloading the applet seems to alleviate this problem somewhat.)
    (b) When the entire frame needs to be redrawn the map disappears completely.
    (c) Setting the color for buttons and other elements gets ignored.
    (d) The method List.clear() (used when pressing the RESET button) doesn't work properly. Clear the list of selected databases manually!
    (e) TextFields don't seem to trigger the right action event, to the effect that hitting <ENTER> doesn't seem to do anything.
    (f) Panning the map by shift-mouse-drag doesn't work at all. Furthermore, it seems to confuse the drawing routines so that a subsequent mouse-drag doesn't draw a rubber band rectangle anymore but a whole set of rectangles.
    (g) Resizing the frame doesn't seem to be caught properly. This means you won't see any scrollbars if you need to make the frame smaller.

    Many of these problem are apparently known to Sun. One can only hope that future releases do away with them.

(Solaris and Java are registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems Inc., Windows95 is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corp.)

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