Author: Sean Luke
In this tutorial we will convert Conway's Game of Life from Tutorials 1 and 2 into an applet.
The simulation.classes file, located in the sim/display directory, specifies which files will appear in the pop-up list when the user chooses "New Simulation...". Edit this file to include only those simulations you wish the user to have access to. If you put the word 'ONLY' on a line all by itself, the user will not be able to type in a simulation classname by hand. If the file consists solely of the world 'ONLY', then the "New Simulation..." menu will be grayed out and the user won't be able to make a new simulation at all.
We begin by building a basic jar file.
jar cvf mason.jar masonThis dumps the entire mason directory, java files and all, into a jar file called mason.jar.
To extract just these files and no others from the MASON directory and stuff them into a jar file, the easiest approach is (in UNIX or on a Mac) to go into the mason directory and type
make jar
This is still a big file for users to download. If you really want to shrink this, you'll need to identify which classes and related files have to be extracted. Generally speaking the only images that need to be extracted for MASON to operate are the PNG files in the display and util/gui directories. The HTML files you need are probably just those in the application directories you wish to make available. And you'll need the simulation.classes file. As to the class files: generally you're safe if you just grab all the class files in the mason directory EXCEPT for various sim/app/... applications you don't wish to include. Certain tutorials have big pictures, and you'll save a lot of space by tossing those tutorials out. If you're not doing Java3D, you can toss out the files in the portrayal3d and display3d directories as well.
Your mason.jar file should be located on the website right next to this HTML file. Here's the result:
The following applet loads the entire MASON toolkit so it may take a second. Please note:
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You can also change what is placed on the button by changing the Name parameter. Note that these parameters have to be changed in several locations in our version of the file, because different web browsers handle HTML in subtly different ways.