WEB-SERVICE BASED THIN CLIENT FOR TELE-MEASUREMENT

As online education services have grown in popularity over the last decade, the need to offer an alternative solution to hands-on measurement activities, especially in the engineering related fields, became one of the top priorities. Blended learning approach is, nowadays, a must for students, teachers and researchers. This paper presents a thin client implementation for a web-service browser based real and emulated tele-measurement of electronic devices and circuits. The thin client offers a web-service based visualization of tele-measurement results as well as multiple-choices in aspects of formats and representations. It displays a customized appearance adapted to the device screen size, to the available input methods (touch screen, mouse, keyboard) and to the available bandwidth, covering the demands in respect of quality of service and quality of experience. Another important feature, fully covered by the proposed implementation, is the ease of access, as the thin client can be accessed simply via common browsers. Furthermore, as enhanced security and reduced computing power needs are highly important, the thin client does not imply additional plugins or third party dependencies which increase the risks and often require additional resources. The paper also presents key aspects regarding the thin client structure and implementation, the communication with a LabVIEW based workbench server and also the user experience - on different terminals - in taking over experimental and simulated results retrieved from the server via the implemented thin client remotely triggered tele-measurement as well as the graphical representation of the obtained data for different screen resolutions.