How to make x-ray simulation software working on WWW: a simple recipe based on seven years of experience

Attaching WWW interfaces to scientific software opens new opportunities to researchers by making their results available to wide scientific community in a way complimentary to publication. We have shown that this task may be much easier than many used to think: the amount of additional code is small, the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) can be written in any language, not necessarily PERL, and the software can be interfaced on any operating system it was originally written and does not have to be ported to UNIX. This paper provides some useful recipes resulted from seven years of author's experience in developing and maintaining highly successful X-ray Web server project. All these solutions are based on free public domain software (Apache, GnuPlot, and InfoZip) and applicable for multiple computer platforms. Some practical examples are provided.