As remote control of electron microscopes progresses from novelty to common practice, various approaches to software and hardware delivery systems have been and will be developed. Production systems will need to provide responsiveness, reliability, real time behavior, security, scalability, and cooperation among heterogeneous operating systems and architectures. These requirements are shared by modern commercial distributed systems for delivering commerce over the Internet. The basic infrastructure of the Internet is growing to meet these demands by gradually replacing older dialup networks and moving to broadband technology that stresses quality of service. The acceptance of standard protocols such as HTML, HTTP, and TCP/IP has given rise to an era of high cooperation among systems with different operating systems and architectures. These protocols have been able to minimize the differences between systems and provide a common language for inter-system communication. The Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) has emerged as a standard for designing and implementing distributed systems mainly for electronic commerce. Supporting its use are software methodologies and technologies such as the Rational Unified Process (RUP), the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and design patterns [1]. This paper discusses how J2EE can successfully be applied to remote microscopy. An actual system called the Java IRSA Gateway (JIG) [3] was developed by one of the authors to control a Philips XL 40 Scanning Electron Microscope. It is in use at
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