If you need to contact us, please go to the Contact page.
Q: Your interactive content does not run on my browser!
A:First, please check if you have Java TM version 1.5 installed and it is enabled on your browser. If not, Windows users should download Java from Sun's (now Oracles's) official web site (http://www.java.com/en/download/). This installer should install the browser plugin as well. For Linux users it may be better to search the distribution repository that also offers free alternatives as IceTea / OpenJDK plugin. At least under Fedora and Ubuntu, Java is very easy to setup this way. Mac users have they Java 1.5 in Safari that works without problems.
Q: They still do not run!
A:Do you click on the Run hyperlink on the top of the applet picture? This is required to start the applet. Also, with some less stable versions of browsers and plugins it may help to start and stop faulty applet several times before it starts to work properly.
Q: Where to report a bug on the site software behavior?
A: here.
Q:How could I start a new article?
A:Enter the name of your article in the search box at the left and press Go to (not Search). In the search results, click on the red link with the article name.
Q:I have some old applet that used to work but I have no time to polish if for Ultrastudio.org now.
A:Use the Rescue page. Also, you may try to upload the non-building or non-running applet. If the license is good enough, it is not too much work and you convince us, we may fix it themselves.
Please visit the abuse report page.
Q: Are you doing anything else than just aggregating content?
A: Almost all applets get at least minor code cleanup (like formatting, removing unused variables or organizing import statements), and about third of them get significant extensions, adaptations and bug fixes. Some applets were even not properly runnable on the web in the shape we found them, and in some corner cases we needed to write additional classes just to build the code. Applet documentation often be written from scratch using the source code as a reference. Article itself also cannot be just a copy-pasted fragment from somewhere, even in cases when it would be legal to do so. Article and applet must complement each other, rather than just being next to each other.
Q: Many other similar projects exist: Wikipedia, Citizendium, WikiHow to name a few. Why do you think it is reasonable to try again from scratch?
A: These are the sites where Ultrastudio.org group has gathered lots of experience, being both key Java developers and Wiki administrators for years. We are opening new website to explore new, amazing technologies that these "classic" sites are unlikely to try in the foreseeable future. We started from proposing these technologies to both Wikipedia and Citizendium but these projects look too stable, to say so. This is easy to understand: especially Wikipedia is already the extremely valuable social resource that likely should not be involved into any more experiments. Hence we continue on our own.
Q: Which technologies are you talking about?
A: Interactive content. In places like Wikipedia you can watch a lot, but you possibilities to experiment are extremely limited. Differently, Ultrastudio.org will provide pages where you can actively participate in the process of visualization: select parameters of the physical process being demonstrated, choose a view point for the Mandelbrot set and so on. There are lots and lots of things possible that may help a lot to understand.
Q: Where do you expect this interactive content to come from?
A: To be contributed, same way as lots of extremely valuable material has been contributed to Wikipedia, SourceForge and lots of other similar places. Many such visualization pieces are already present on the web and often under Open Source licenses. Apart several stronger sites, they status is quite often similar as it was for various useful information before Wikipedia appeared: unlinked, unknown, unsupported, always on a boundary of existence. All we need is to collect them. We expect that much more will be written after
Q: Is it more difficult to create interactive content?
A: Yes, it is. While text and pictures are just information, interactivity requires to write the software. Only programming users can contribute such a content. This is a big challenge, and likely the reason why sites like Wikipedia prefer not to risk. However many people that are professionals in other areas have learned programming till level they can easily write such content. These so called web applets are between simplest software in real use, and also programming as a discipline is not very difficult in general. On the dawn of informatics there were classes of Fortran and Pascal in some schools, not the most difficult subject for many pupils. Near everybody can easily learn programming at entry level, same as to drive a car or even steam locomotive; all you need is a good reason to try.
Q: I can have my own website, why should I contribute here?
A: Having an applet is not a complete work. You need a supplementary text explaining that is demonstrated, and most of the applets on a web badly lack this. Wiki community may help here a lot. Also, applets may be tricky to deploy on a web at these times. Our server dynamically adjusts the object-embed-applet tags, working hardly around the browser incompatibilities. You cannot beat the server with database at hand using several lines of JavaScript you may try to embed in your code. After all, the community is just a lot of fun, always. Joining the real Free Software project is difficult: the true projects are complex, need a lot of time to participate, also may hand you some unpleasant papers for your employer to sign. They need to do this because once given, your contribution may be very difficult to remove from the twisted code of the complex project. Funny but Free Software developers are under the threat to form elite of its own: a "right" education plus citizenship in a country with strong unemployment protection may become a condition to stay in a Free world. Tiny individual projects do not have this problem but they frequently do not give you anything better the download counter slowly ticking up. Ultrastudio.org is aiming to address this problem by creating a community of non-elite yet Free developers. An applet encyclopedia makes a single strong project, yet the individual applets are easy to drop if so required.
Q: But that about buggy contributions? Malicious code? Surely the code from inexperienced people is likely to have a lot of problems?
A: Maybe, while even professional developers produce bugs way more often than desired. Yet the problem exists, and it took lots of hard work for us to solve it. A new code contribution will not go to the production pages directly. First, the source code is exposed for the community for review. At this stage, we believe, most of the malicious and just stupid stuff should be discovered and eliminated. Only later, if it still makes sense, the code will be approved for test runs in the dedicated page where the ordinary readers do not go. Finally after passing also this stage the code may be approved for production. All this complex system is implemented and in place, now, ready to use.
Q: Do you rely exclusively of reviewing process?
A: We rely mostly on the reviewing process. Many eyes make all bugs shallow, as Linux developers used to say and code reviews are efficient as serious books write. However every call to the Java system library also has a safety metadata in the compiler database, and our Watchdog will bark more than enough if all the code demonstrates is a DOS attack on our server. Contribution to Ultrastudio.org is normally an open source contribution, and Trojans are not that common in the FOSS world - a cracker usually wants to sell malicious stuff rather than risking to loose it when community spots tricks in the code. And do not forget about the final stage of protection, the security manager that every web browser has. It is supposed to provide enough safety on its own.
Q: How can you be sure that anybody looked properly into the source code you posted on a web?
A: The initiative group also reviews these applets itself, looking into every class.
Q: Still, how safe is to use your site?
A: There is a non zero risk that everything may happen and our Disclaimer offers no warranty against this. However we believe that working with Ultrastudio.org is safer than doing random web search and landing on a random site. Such random site can easily have all stack of complex malware carefully prepared and waiting for you. Malware is not that easy to hide in several pages of open code that is watched by many eyes. We tried to secure the site properly: nothing runs as root, database, servers and compiler are all SELinux-confined, firewall is in place and management access is with RSA keys only. HTML of any kind is totally banned on all wiki and should be filtered from user input. Pre-compiled statements should guard against SQL injection. From your side, please keep Java on your browser updated to the most recent version. For the ultimate safety you can also turn your JavaScript off when you run applets.
Q: Will it still work with JavaScript off?
A: We use JavaScript for faster applet launching (no need to reload the page) and in some places of code review. However it is not required to use the site; applets will run happily also with just Java enabled and JavaScript disabled. Yet to have Java without JavaScript is a combination so extraordinary that we have observed some browsers crashing!
Q: You said Java? Java applets? Is not this a dying technology? Why do not you use JavaScript - C# - Flash - Python - Eiffel - Perl - C (..) ?
A:Programming language by itself is not something that you get for life; its importance is usually strongly overestimated. Recent programmers usually 'speak' at least five or six programming languages and easily learn more when required. Good algorithms have been rewritten into various languages many times. We think that at the current stage Java still provides the best balance between security, popularity, performance, vendor independence (due OpenJDK) and just ability to run as a browser plugin. Maybe were are mistaken, but lets do not start the holy war on that.
Q: So the site uses a combination of Wiki engine and Java applets. Am I right?
A:Yes. The Wiki part operates largely under the same rules and licenses as Wikipedia and applet part reuses many successful concepts from the history of the Free/Open Source software.
Q: In which form the applets are contributed to the project?
A: The applets are contributed in the source code only. The source must be uploaded in the contribution page, and they must have the agreed internal structure. Then such archive is first checked and then compiled on a server side.
Q: Can I use any of the existing visualization libraries?
A: Yes. We currently support JFreeChart and Prefuse, these two tools can accelerate your development dramatically. You do not need your own code just to draw a graph of function. Both JFreeChart and Prefuse are Open Source tools, ready for you to download from they sites in SourceForge. You do not need to upload these libraries with your code, all you need it to check the dependency check box. However be careful as great user friendly tools also often 'isolate' from the most interesting ideas and solutions.
Q: Can I propose my own library?
Yes but you must first prove it makes enough sense. Best way to prove is to have your own web site devoted to that library where we could check its popularity and also to submit at least three good applets that use it.
Q: I do not have a source code. Can I just upload the applet .jar?
A:If you cannot upload the sources, your contribution is likely not suitable for us. No binary blobs can be allowed on a community site because there is no way to verify that they are hiding inside.
Q: Is Ultrastudio.org an applet development platform?
A:No, it is not. It is a sharing platform. You must develop applets with some other tool like Eclipse or NetBeans and only submit the finished, working code to Ultrastudio.org . Please respect people time and server resources.
Q: Can I create and write pages that do not use any Java applets?
A: We are unsure why would you need to do this when Wikipedia exists. Our rules are not much different. Well, if you have any reason for that - of course, you can.
Q: Is this a Free Content web site?
A: Yes, texts are under Creative Commons Attribution Share alike and most of applets are open source. Some to say non-free content is currently allowed to accept old, abandoned applets with weird licenses of all kinds, as long as these licenses allow to share the code and run applets on our pages. In the future we may not need this exception any longer. Please check Terms of use.
Q: Can I get the applet source code in a plain text form, so I could build them?
A: The project page of every applet contains a link to the compressed .zip archive, containing the applet source code.
Q:: Why many articles are shorter than in Wikipedia, for instance, even when you state you use Wikipedia as a source?
A: Longer is not always better. We try to select only the most important, relevant information and remove details that may more obfuscate than help. Also, when the article is long, it may be tempting for a student to use it as the only source for studies, making a huge mistake. No encyclopedia, even really good one, should have ambitions to be the only learning material in a serious study. Students must use specialized textbooks with much more pages per subject that is possible in encyclopedia or even original articles, following our references. We think that encyclopedia is more for brief, initial understanding about previously fully unknown subject and may be involved when the specialized literature seems to the novice too difficult to understand. Hence it is better not to over try with lots of text and equations.
Q':How are you related to the Plan at the top?
A: We just support them by keeping this narrow banner for free.
Q: Can I be here more than a user and contributor?
A: People who are interested in creating and maintaining this website can apply for administrators as well, but we must have a sufficient reasons to promote them to this rank.
Q: What do you think about Google - Oracle lawsuit?
A: It is unlikely to have any relation to this site. OpenJDK is not Android.
Q: Who owns this server and this website? Who supports it, how long it is expected to stay?
A: This side is hosted on a physical servers that are privately owned by independent people, same who also developed rewritten Wiki engine, new reviewing system and adapted code copiler with they own hands. The same people collected and adapted the first applets for the initial set of articles. There are currently no people who need to live on that the site earns so any expenses are just expenses for the server housing. Not that this says a lot but may be enough for beginning. If you write and applet and contribute here you still own it, same about pictures and other content. The longevity of this project will depend largely on its success. First we will try to "spin up" the project by running the site literally for free. This cannot last indefinitely, so later we will ask for some donations to support its further existence. If the donations will not come, we will try to survive on ads. The initial requirements are not so big: our low power server only needs 99 swiss franks per month for housing plus four for carbon neutral operation. This new, state of art machine should support quite serious traffic.
Q: That is this black bird on the top left?
A: Alpine chough (Pyrrhocorax graculus), our logo. We designed it themselves so hopefully own the copyright.
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