User:Audriusa/Ultrastudio.org

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Ultrastudio.org

Screenshot border|300px|alt=Homepage with two available applets. Homepage with two available applets]]
Type of business	Nonprofit
Type of site	Internet encyclopedia project
Available in	English
Headquarters	Zurich, Switzerland
URL	Ultrastudio.org
Commercial	No
Registration	Optional, not required for editing
Launched	June 10, 2010 (2010-06-10)
Current status	Current
Content license	Creative Commons Attribution/ Share-Alike 3.0 (content), various FOSS licenses (applets)

Ultrastudio.org is a manually curated collection of educational Java applets, along with short explaining articles next to them. It combines a Wiki engine, code reviewing system and security-aware Java compiler.

As a longer term goal, the site expect to build its own community that would assist in applet search, reviewing, adaptation and inclusion. However currently the most of such activities are concentrated inside the core group or professionals. The site promises to transfer 50 sFr (about $45) to Plan International in response to every article + applet pair that has been actively contributed by the user.

Ultrastudio.org is on the head of the "Top 5 %" rating list at Jars.com .

Infrastructure

In spite of the similar appearance, the site in is not using MediaWiki. Instead, it is using the modified JAMWiki at the top of the Tomcat web server. The programming language used on the site is Java and the main language used for the site's textual content is English.

Applets are uploaded in the form of the source code and compiled on the server side. The code is automatically presented in the code reviewing system with possibility for all users to post comments. If the applet is derived from some previously uploaded prototype, system can present the code difference view. After the initial check the applets are approved for testing, and after successful testing they may be approved for use in the main pages. The applets are inserted into text very much the way the images are inserted. The server automatically adjusts the necessary HTML tags depending on the browser identification string.

The server side applet builder contains the database of all classes and methods of Java 1.5 system library, with every method marked as either "allowed" or "questionable". The builder highlights all calls to questionable methods (potential pieces of malware), making them easier to check before the applet even actually is allowed to run.

The site also hosts Eclipse mirror.

History

Early history

The idea that Java applets could be an excellent media has been proposed as early as in 1999, supporters being convinced that:

• the unsupervised studies of static content may not be sufficient for understanding complex concepts, and
• the distance learning does not scale well enough if the human teacher must interact with every student.

From the other side, despite of the availability of the source code and growing number of FOSS projects, for a long time Java has been considered 'non-free' and hence poorly suitable for enthusiasts of Free content. The problem was well understood at that time, with alternative GNU Classpath being one of the top priority projects in FSF. The interest raised after Sun released OpenJDK under Open Source license. The idea to include applets as part of Wikipedia-like encyclopedia has been published in JavaWorld in 2008, and the Wikversity project (LabsWiki) has been launched near at the same time. It aims to create both Java applet support for MediaWiki and applets themselves. The project page at contains the code of some applets that were all later included into Ultrastudio.org as well.

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.

Operation

The site initially expected to get contributors by providing attractive infrastructure (Wiki language, efficient code reviewing system, server side assistance for the more reliable applet launches), and went online with the initial "seed set" of only 14 articles. However in the first two months of operation the number of articles have increased till 54, covering mostly various topics on physics, mathematics and sequence analysis. While some applets have been explicitly submitted, in some cases altering the initial licenses, the initiative group also found and collected many open source applets under they own initiative. Near all applets are modified one or another way, performing various cleanup and optimizations.

The site claims to be climate neutral.