PhysBeans - a Toolkit to simplify the Construction of Applets for Physics Simulation
Peter Junglas · 2004
Constructing a simulation program that can be used for teaching physical phenomena is a lot of work. The concepts of graphical programming, as known from JavaBeans or Visual Basic, could help here: They reduce the programming task mainly to selecting a number of predefined blocks and connecting them with the mouse. PhysBeans is a library of such building blocks specially designed for the simple construction of physical simulations. It is based on the Java Beans model and contains blocks for standard input and display elements, for physical models and their visualisation and for mathematical functions. To show the benefits of this approach the creation of an example applet for the simulation of an electric dipole is demonstrated. Starting point is a graphical block diagram which shows the used building blocks and the flow of information between them. This diagram can simply be rebuilt in a graphical programming environment, reducing the amount of hand written source code to a minimum. PhysBeans has been used to create applets from many different physical areas. The library and all applets are released as open source.