Web app development progress

We are making progress in developing web apps using HTML5 technologies – Javascript and CSS. We have one HTML5 web app posted and are continuing to revise it as we develop our approach. See Web app experiments under the Resources tab.

The architecture we are using is that of separate code objects, representing separate process units, which send messages to each other. This architecture allows us to change a simulation easily by adding or subtracting units from a system model.

These dynamic simulations solve a set of coupled, first-order, ordinary differential equations. This type of system is termed an “initial value problem.” The solution method is stepping in time (the independent variable here) using the Euler method. The Euler method has inherent numerical errors, as do other numerical methods, but the solutions can be corrected to approach the exact solution, as we have done in several labs in the desktop Reactor Lab.