Developing interactive educational engineering software for the world wide web with Java

The World Wide Web has emerged as an effective mechanism for distributing educational material to students beyond the bounds of the classroom. The introduction of mobile code, such as Java applets, combined with the pervasiveness of the World Wide Web, present the potential to significantly enhance the development and distribution of educational software. This paper illustrates the design and implementation of a Java applet for use in educational propulsion engineering curricula. The Java Gas Turbine Simulator applet provides an interactive graphical environment which allows the rapid, efficient construction and analysis of arbitrary gas turbine systems. The simulation system couples a graphical user-interface and a transient, space-averaged, aero-thermodynamic gas turbine analysis method, both entirely coded in the Java language. The combined package provides analytical, graphical and data management tools which allow the student to construct and control dynamic gas turbine simulations by manipulating graphical objects on the computer display screen. The simulator, running as a Java applet, can be easily accessed from the World Wide Web and run from a variety of heterogeneous computer platforms, including PC’s, Macintosh, and UNIX machines, through the use of Java-enabled Web