Refas - The Reference Assistant has been written using the the Java programming language. This language is platform neutral which means it should run on any machine that has a compatible virtual machine. Essentially this means it should run on all versions of Windows, most Linux machines and most / all Sun machines. As far as we know it should run on later Apple Macs (OS X) and BSD but both will require a 1.4 virtual machine and a little tweaking probably

NOTE : Due to the platform neutral nature of the software there may be slight variations in the exact look and feel of the software on different platforms.

Ok so what is a platform and what's this Virtual Machine thingy?

A platform would typically be defined as a hardware and operating system combination for instance one platform would be i386 / Windows 2000 (Intel i386 compatible hardware running the Windows 2000 operating system) another platform might be i386 / Linux (Again Intel i386 compatible hardware but this time running a flavour of Linux as the operating system).

There are hundreds of possible combinations of hardware and software each producing a different platform. To write software that works on all those different platforms (as does so equally well) is a difficult task. Fortunately Sun Microsystems took most of the work out of that by developing the Java language which is platform neutral or independent of the hardware and software combination that it runs on.

Now that sounds great but it does have a down side. All those different platforms use different instructions to achieve the same goals (eg displaying pictures on the screen). Java being neutral has to be able to "speak" all the different languages so that it can communicate with the underlying machine. This communication is handled by another piece of software called a virtual machine (VM). It takes the instructions in the software we wrote and converts them to instructions the machine understands.

The biggest problem with having to use the VM is that it slows down program execution. You may notice (especially on older machines) that things can take a little longer than you would normally expect. Refas uses the latest VM (1.4) which has made may improvements in speed an most people will find it fast enough. We have tested it with 7500 references and it still runs fast on an 800MHz system.

If you are interested in learning more about Java this (http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/) is a good place to start