As cellular automata are becoming popular in many research areas, the need for an easy-to-use system for cellular automata programming is becoming greater. Traditionally, cellular automata transition functions were manually depicted in a tabular format, which is often time-consuming and error prone. A more promising approach is to design a general-purpose cellular automata programming environment. In this thesis, a new cellular automata simulation environment, jTrend, is introduced. jTrend was developed on the Java platform for cellular automata exploratory research. With a built-in high-level programming language and an easy-to-use graphical user interface, jTrend has become one of the most powerful cellular automata simulators, and can be used for most one- and two-dimensional cellular automata simulations. The object-oriented design and performance optimization techniques used in jTrend provide high flexibility and fast simulation speed. jTrend has been used to study some real world problems in cellular automata. Solutions for two important problems, bubble sort and satisfiability (SAT), have been implemented using jTrend. Their experiment results suggest that it may be advantageous to solve problems using cellular automata, and jTrend provides a foundation to test such ideas.