Platform-independent, interactive, on-line laboratories accessible on the Internet, can increase the efficiency of student self-study in the speech analysis domain which is inherently multimedia in nature, involving both sound and vision. In the context of distance learning on the World-Wide Web, we argue that Java is a natural language to develop interactive educational material for such laboratories that can be shared and distributed widely. The interactive and computational capabilities of Java are demonstrated through modular speech analysis laboratory (JavaSpeechLab) based on Java application and applet. The JavaSpeechLab features a graphical user-friendly interface and can be used on the World-Wide Web through a Java-enabled Web browser. JavaSpeechLab is an excellent Computer-Assisted Learning (CAL) work-bench because of its conceptual ease. In this software laboratory the common "frame-window" environment is provided for all types of analysis from the simplest in the time domain (e.g. short-time energy or zero-crossing rate) through the classical one using short-term Fourier transform to the most complex in the time-spectral domain based on multi-resolution wavelet packet transforms which use different windows and frames at different frequency subbands. Desirable features, capabilities, deficiencies, and current implementations in the Signal Processing Laboratory (LTS) of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) of this CAL system for learning speech analysis techniques are discussed.