A Java-based implementation of collaborative active textbooks

At VL´96, the authors presented CAT, a system for building Web-based collaborative active textbooks on algorithms. CAT augmented the expressive power of Web pages for publishing passive multimedia information with a full-fledged interactive algorithm animation system. Views of a running program could reside on different machines, which made CAT particularly well-suited for electronic classrooms. In such a setting, a teacher would control the animation, while students would view the animation by pointing their Web browsers at the appropriate page. CAT was based on their in-house family of Web browsers, which supports applets written in Obliq, a distributed scripting language. The paper describes a Java-based implementation of CAT, which can be used with standard Web browsers