This application simulates the movement of noble gases within a closed
container (piston and cylinder). The end-user (student) can adjust
several variables to interact with the model: temperature within the
piston and cylinder, volume of the cylinder, and the noble gas to
simulate. Numerous displays inform the end-user about what is happening
to the model. A temperature and volume meter display their respective
measurements. A bar graph gives a visual measurement of the molecular
speed distribution.
The product was developed using Sun's Java Development Kit 2. Since
the latest versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape do not support
JDK 1.2.2, it was necessary to use Sun's Java Plug-in Software.
The plug-in enabled us to direct applets on our web pages to run
using Sun's Java 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (JRE) instead
of the web browser's default virtual machine.
In addition to these technologies, our team used several tools to
hasten the development process. In conjunction with the plug-in, our
team used Sun's HTML conversion utility to create HTML web pages which
would direct the web browser to download the Java plug-in if it is
not already installed. We used numerous Java editors: Microsoft's
Visual J++, Symantec's Visual Cafe, and IBM's VisualAge for Java.
Thorough developing and testing were done on a UNIX-based X-Windows
programming environment.
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