Labicom.net - The on-line laboratories platform

Abstract

This paper describes a new software web-based system for hosting and sharing on-line laboratories - Labicom platform [1] available at https://labicom.net. This platform serves the growing needs of expanding technical curriculum into internet-based engineering courses and allows deploying, hosting and sharing laboratory resources between people all over the world. It frees laboratory owners from many responsibilities (such as creating and managing time reservation system, keeping the trusted certificate, etc.) and gives more time and freedom to concentrate on subject specific tasks rather than on computer science. On-line laboratories hosted on Labicom are normally accessible worldwide from modern web-browsers in many languages. Laboratory owners have an opportunity to localize their labs to as many languages as they want. Labicom.net represents multi-tier distributed server-client net of applications. Currently only a few laboratories are connected (Remote Laser Laboratory (RLL) [2], [3] is the most mature) but they are already used in beta-testing. New features and updates are applied regularly and new labs are supposed to join the platform soon.