Ptolemy II 0.3alpha1 is available for online demonstrations and downloading. The release is available at http://ptolemy.eecs.berkeley.edu/ptolemyII/ptII0.3/ That page says: --start-- Ptolemy II 0.3 is the first Ptolemy II release to include domains, actors, and applets of sufficient quality and architectural stability to use as models for development. The domain-polymorphic actor libraries, in the ptolemy.actor.lib and ptolemy.actor.gui packages are still small, but reasonably solid. An infrastructure for easily constructing applets is also provided, and several of the domains of the matured to the point that serious modeling is possible. The documentation has progressed considerably, and now includes a tutorial on writing applets and chapters on actor libraries and several of the domains. Nonetheless, Ptolemy II 0.3 is still an interim release. It includes a great deal of code that has not progressed beyond our "yellow" code rating, and some that has not progressed beyond "red." You should use caution when basing your own development on such code. For such code, we have not yet made any commitment, even internally, to keeping the interface the same. You can find the code rating at the beginning of all source code files. Unrated files are all "red." The Ptolemy II 0.3 applets require the JDK1.2 plug-in. If you have JDK1.2 installed on your machine, then the plug-in may already be installed. You may obtain the JDK1.2 plug-in from JavaSoft (http://www.javasoft.com/products/plug-in/) The plug-in is easiest to use from a Windows machine. If you don't have access to a Windows machine, you can run the applets by downloading Ptolemy II 0.3 and running 'make demo' For more information, see the Plug-In section of the Installation page. There are also some serious infrastructural problems with applets that we believe are due to quality problems with the Sun plug-in that is required to run the applets. Applications and applets run under the Sun appletviewer do not exhibit these problems. The JDK1.2.1 Plug-in has a known bug described at http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/bugParade/bugs/4236070.html that causes the Netscape or Iexplorer process to linger after exiting. The workaround is to turn of the JIT using the Java Plug-in Control Panel, see the Troubleshooting guide for details. Another known problem is that some of the applets will not run a second time without reloading the Java classes. Unfortunately, the JDK1.2.1 plug-in makes it difficult to reload the classes, the easiest thing is to restart your browser. (The Troubleshooting Guide includes a method of reloading Java classes by turning off the Jar Cache). When you visit a Ptolemy II applet, the first applet that is run will download ptsupport.jar, which is 478k. Each applet then will download smaller domain specific jar files of between 18k and 65k. If you have a slow network connection, or if there is congestion in the network or on our server, you may experience significant delays before the first applet runs. Some of the applets use Diva, a visualization package. diva.jar file is roughly 550k. We would be interested in any feedback you might have concerning these demos. You can send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] --end-- A major limitation to 0.3alpha1 is that the docs that are shipped with the release are not yet finished, they need further proofreading. However, the quality of the documentation is sufficient that developers creating models should find them useful. My hope is that the production Ptolemy II 0.3 release will go out around June 30. -Christopher ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted to the ptolemy-hackers mailing list. Please send administrative mail for this list to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
