front matter
I started working on my PhD thesis in 1995 at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. My work was mainly focused on the acoustic wave equation, and I needed to combine theoretical models with experimental data, which, of course, required data processing and visualization. Around that same time, a new programming language named Java was unveiled. Several things made Java attractive for scientific work, including its portability to different platforms, which made it easy to create applications with a user interface and execute them on the various platforms I was working on.
However, it occurred to me that there was a large gap between the scientific world and the IT world. While researchers in science are typically trying to find answers to difficult questions, ITers are working on implementing the results of science and dealing with scalability, failover, code reuse, and functional or object-oriented development. Often, ideas and models created by scientists need to be implemented by ITers. Scientists should not worry about unit tests, while ITers should not have knowledge of the Standard Model of physics; but somehow, the handover between the two areas should be smooth.