Today Oracle released a short video where they interview Sean Phillips and Diane Davis from a.i. Solutions. In it they talk about the architecture behind their software solution for doing incredibly complex deep space trajectory calculations. Sean has presented this software in the past at JavaOne and Oracle Code conferences, and it is always fascinating seeing the amazing visualizations that are generated in a rich desktop application on the users machine using JavaFX. For anyone unfamiliar with this software, a.i. Solutions have a blog post containing some videos of the software in action.
Gluon's #CloudLink is letting me use Oracle's #BareMetal cloud to compute spacecraft trajectories beyond Earth's clouds.
— Sean Phillips (@SeanMiPhillips) June 22, 2017
In the video embedded below, we get to see how this works behind the scenes, and it is through a combination of Oracle Cloud Container Services, Oracle Bare Metal Compute services, and Gluon CloudLink.
Due to the complexities of the trajectory computations, doing the calculations on desktop or mobile devices would take a very long time. Therefore, the JavaFX desktop application offloads most computations to an Oracle Bare Metal compute service which provides massive computing power. A tight integration between the client application and the server computations is needed though, as changing one parameter on the client may result in new or additional computations to be performed.
This communication between the client application and the Oracle Bare Metal compute service is done through Gluon CloudLink, as this enables a simple approach to connecting rich user interfaces to one or more cloud backends without the need of boilerplate code that takes into account things like connection issues, security, (un)marshalling,… The Gluon CloudLink Function Builder is used to configure the interactions between the client application and the back-end system.
Once the computations are completed on the Oracle Cloud, the results then return through Gluon CloudLink and are automatically synced into the user interface of the requesting user, taking into account the fact that the user in the meantime might have changed some settings, e.g. filter parameters. Because of this architecture, a.i. Solutions are able to extend the deployment of their software onto mobile devices and tablets. In fact, their existing JavaFX investment transfers directly onto mobile thanks to Gluon Mobile.