Scientific computing on the Internet: Direct resolution of several engineering problems

The Internet, in an era of its omnipresence, has not, in our opinion, been significantly used for scientific computing. We ourselves have, nonetheless, made full use of the former to implement the latter, namely in teaching. We present several illustrations of the practice of scientific computing on the Internet, applied to the direct resolution of some engineering cases: chemical and civil engineering, operational research, and statistics. We believe that this approach has been beneficial, namely, in our teaching activities. The extension to the collaboration with industry is obvious, provided that adequate conditions are secured. Our applications are built on a Linux platform and combine several necessary tools and computer languages (PHP, Fortran 90, `gnuplot'). As truly Web applications, this approach has the advantages of allowing for ubiquitous access without any software installation on the user's computer (except in an example with WebMathematica), thus avoiding machine or platform peculiarities.