Ultrastudio.org is an educational site built along the lines of “encyclopedia that anyone can edit” with essential enhancement: content interactivity. The site is free to use for anyone, and most of the contents are under various Free licenses. Ultrastudio.org offers browser side components (Java applets) that allow to understand the subject by experimenting rather than just by passively absorbing even rich media. We believe that in many cases interactive content can make complex topics much easier to understand, and this may be even more true for distance learning.
These small interactive components (Java applets in our case) are written and contributed the site users, same way as all other content is contributed to portals of this kind. To ensure the acceptable quality and suitability, all contributed code is public and is subject to code review before approval for testing and later for production use. The site engine provides server site compilation with consistency and security checks, easy ways to insert applet into pages using Wiki markup, server side code adjustment depending on the visiting browser and online reviewing system. As the encyclopedia is still tiny we suggest to browse articles by category. The applets do not run by default, to launch, you need to click Run on the top left of the applet window. With JavaScript enabled (not required) you can also launch them by clicking directly on the screen shot. Other links next to Run lead to the applet home page, code review and project page. The project page contains applet user documentation.
The operation of this site is climate neutral.
Our server enforces all applets to be "unsigned". Such applets always run under extreme security restrictions without access to you local computer; you cannot grant such access even on purpose. Also, we require recent Java versions that have important security enhancements.
Our applet tag asks to use the most recent Java virtual machine available. Browser or operating system will show security warning when Java plugin will try to update itself. This warnings sounds Do you want to allow the following program to make changes on this computer? While our applets never modify machine on that they run, the Java installer does. If you are uneasy in answering 'yes' from our website, please go manually to the official http://www.java.com/en/download/ site, update Java there and them come back.
See more on security.
Free/Open Source world currently owns the contribution of the immense value - Java implementation, once contributed by Sun Microsystems. Java has been and remains between most popular languages in the world. Lots of educational applets have been written through the world over years. Not all of them come from the initial raise of Java: some really good applet projects started in as recently as in 2010 (see BABA[1], for instance).
From the other side, educational applets so far have seen little (if any) benefit for open sourcing Java. Major community encyclopedias keep lacking applet support that seems requiring significant alterations of they now stable, mature and already heavily used infrastructure. We are new, small and can experiment more easily. The purpose of this portal is to show that Java applets are really well suited for educational content and that it is possible to have a process to use build and use them safely by community.
Lack of the central location to unite developers of the educational applets has the following big negative impact:
During month of operation, the site has grown from the initial 14 applet "seed set" about 50 applets at the moment, each of them having explaining article next to it. Some articles reuse Wikipedia material, but many are differently written, aiming for short, clear introduction rather than full of coverage. The numbers are not that big, and actually only tiny fraction of even very promising topics is covered, but the site already gets in average about 154 page views per day (excluding spiders and all Switzerland). Many applets have been launched. Ultrastudio.org is currently heading the "top 5 %" rating list at Jars.com. This seems enough for the project of our age and profile.
Java applet is a powerful feature to illustrate mathematical, technical, electric and some other subjects, from interactive function graphs till mathematical models with advanced visualization. Unlike animations, they may have controls to interact with the user, allowing active experiments. They are fast enough for non trivial visualizations that are computation intensive. They are more portable, secure and website-integrable than standalone applications.
Actually, in somewhat 1998's the good part of Java - related talks were talks about applets, while the main direction was general improvement of the web site appearance like enhanced animations. This direction seems exhausted now: applets are overkill just for visual effects and simpler technologies tend taking over.
However a completely different group of applets started to emerge during the years. Lots of applets were created for educational and similar purposes. It is even possible to suspect that this is one of the most successful areas of they use. Apart separate applets, there are also some big projects, for instance, the complete suite to assist the course on differential equations[2], a portal devoted to heart physiology[3], a suite of stunning applets on physics[4][5] and lots more.
There are quite many such applets on the web but they must be stored at the cost of they authors and frequently disappear when the funding ceases. Many are available with the full source code but without any clear license, so it is not obvious if even screen shot can reused. Another problem is the supplementary text next to the applet: often the author of quite good code has no more time to explain properly about his/her creature. Many applets appear with only rudimentary explanations, and sometimes without any. This is also true for applets that really need some explaining material to be understood. The assisting writer whose role is as important as the role of the applet developer can help a lot, completing the page into serious educational material.
Our collection may look tiny, but it already has the size of the typical collection of the educational applets. Now, when the infrastructure is in place, we work mostly on applets, adding one or two every few days - tested, reviewed and, if needed, fixed. We use open content licenses from Creative Commons, we use open source license for applets, all our stack is open source based - we really hope to become a free community project and a valuable resource on the web. We aim to be an answer to the frequently unclear question "where can I share Java applets online?".
The idea that Java applets could be an excellent media has been proposed as early as in 1999, supporters being convinced that:
While never focused on this mission, SourceForge can also be viewed as a first prototype of applet encyclopedia, as it hosts source code, executables and startup pages for many various applets. Good half of the applets in Ultrastudio.org come from SourceForge as they licenses are always appropriate.
The idea was remembered during the 2010 year Wikipedia strategic planing [11]. The proposal caused a hot discussion without obvious consensus [12]. The very similar article has been posted to Citizendium [13] and also article has been presented in Advogato [14].
Opponents of the project raised concerns about equal opportunities to contribute, as developing interactive content requires programming skills, English and more capable hardware that minimally possible just to support the web browser. Applets also cannot run on proprietary devices where vendor does no allow Java, even when technically possible. The arguments of the opposing side seem have not convinced the proponents, claiming that such portal would provide good opportunity to learn industrial programming language and it is not necessary to support various uncommon exotic platforms.
While the applet proposal has been flagged as "featured proposal", it did not progress very well. From the other side, Wikipedia is already a very valuable resource that must be careful about making decisions. Hence the initiative group - largely the same key people - have launched they own project that now stands in front of you. If you know a good applet under Free/Open Source license that is not yet in Ultrastudio.org , you can propose it for us.
After checking the source code, adapting for encyclopedic use and fixing any discovered bugs these applets will appear next to the new articles.
New articles (RSS)
