Applets for the STP Project
Physlets were developed originally by Wolfgang Christian at Davidson College. Physlets typically appear with several other Physlets on a page. Usually, there will be one or more data-source Physlets and one or more data-listener Physlets. A data-source will run a simulation governed by a clock and export properties of the simulation. These properties can selectively be imported by a data-listener and then displayed. A data-listener can be anything including graphs, tables, histograms, bar graphs, and animations.
JavaScript is used to link the data-sources to their corresponding data-listeners. In the JavaScript code you can specify which variables should be read by the listeners, and you can even filter the data by applying any analytic function to it. One of the advantages of Physlets are that instructors can modify the functionality of a Physlet by modifying the JavaScript code rather than the Java source code itself. The applets run on any Java 1.1 capable browser with JavaScript-to-Java scripting capability (also know as LiveConnect).
The Physlets on this page are released under the GNU General Public License. The source code is readily available as a link off of each Phylet's page. However, the Physlet framework used by these Physlets itself is not free software and should not be distributed.
Note: Most Physlets will not run on a Macintosh: Even though the latest version of Java on the Macintosh is excellent both Internet Explorer 4.5 and Netscape 4.x do not support LiveConnect. Furthermore, Netscape 4.x does not fully implement Java 1.1. All Physlets have been tested on Netscape Navigator 4.5 and Internet Explorer 5.0 on Windows NT. They should also run on most Unix and Linux computers, but we have not tested them yet.