Updated on 10 June 1996 by ausweb96@scu.edu.auAusWeb96 - Example Theme

Software Distribution and User Authentication on the Web

Kent Fitch, CSIRO Canberra kent.fitch@its.csiro.au

Kent says about himself:
I have been a principal of Project Computing Pty Ltd, a small Canberra
based software developer since 1984. I've worked as a contract programmer
and analyst at many Government departments and in the private sector,
specialising in database, text retrieval, communications and system
programming orginally quite happily in the MVS, VTAM/SNA and ASM world,
and for the past 4 years, blissfully with UNIX, Windows, TCP/IP and WWW
using C, Visual Basic and currently Java.

I set up the initial CSIRO 'home page' on the World Wide Web in February
1994, and have since implemented many web based systems for CSIRO
including the WWW interface to the SIM SGML text engine, a software
distribution system and the Unix and Windows components of the CSIRO PGP
user authentication tool.

My current interests are celebrating the beauty of the Java environment:
building applications using Java and exploring the use of HTML/Java
enabled mail clients, distributed Java objects and JDBC as components of
workflow systems.

Kent says about the paper:
I'd like to explain a practical use of the Web which goes a long way to
solving a major problem for a highly dispersed organisation such as CSIRO
- software distribution. The system described in the paper was originally
only used for distributing software which we had written, purchased site
licenses for, or was freeware. When we planned to extend the system to
cover individually licensed software, we had to decide how to identify the
purchasers and how to arrange for them to digitally sign the requisition
using the WWW. Designing the system to operate efficiently in the
geographically and managerially decentralised CSIRO environment presented
some interesting challanges.
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AusWeb96 - The Second Australian World Wide Web Conference, 7th to 9th of July 1996, at the Conrad Jupiters Hotel, Gold Coast, Australia. Contact: Ms Julie Burton, Norsearch Conference Services at Southern Cross University, PO Box 157, Lismore, NSW 2480, Australia. Phone (066) 20 3000 (From outside Australia +61 66 20 3000) Fax: (066) 22 1954 (From outside Australia +61 66 22 1954). Email: ausweb96@scu.edu.au.