See also: Interactive tutorial of using JAIMEAS and JAIDraw

What is JAIMEAS?

What does JAIMEAS stand for?

JAIMEAS = Java Active Interface Made EASy.

JAI is also short for "Just An Idea". In French (written as J'ai) it also means "I have", which might remind you of the famous speech by Martin Luther King: "I have a dream". I my case it also means "I have an idea".

The program

JAIMEAS is a general purpose Java applet that allows you to create an "active interface" for Web pages very easily and quickly.

JAIMEAS is for active interfaces what AWK (on Unix) is for searching and SED (also Unix) is for text manipulation.

What do you mean by Active Interface

An active interface can be many things, that is the interesting part of this applet. If you look at the examples on this site, you may get an idea of what you can do with it.

To name a few examples:

• button bars, with buttons that react on mouse move, mouse down and mouse up.
  A button can be used to load a page in another browser window or frame (among others).
• Animation: loop over a set of images or other objects.
  Besides images you can use rectangles, rounded rectangles, ovals, polygons and text.
• Product presentations.
• Computer Aided Learning (see cal_comp example).
• Simple games, see e.g. the memory and puzzle examples.
  I've used drag and drop in the puzzle example.
• Things can be combined.
  E.g a button that becomes an animation when you move the mouse into it.

How does it work

The applet is driven by a script. The script contains two things:

• the definitions of the objects to use
• the actions on the objects

Isn't this overkill

The applet is designed to be as small as possible. Considering its capabilities, 4 classes totaling 28k bytes is relatively small.

For many uses a custom made Java applet can be smaller, but not much more than a factor of 4. Since JAIMEAS is a general purpose applet, you can reuse it for several purposes on your site. Since most browsers cache the applet, it needs to be loaded only once. With several button bars on different pages the amount of bytes to download might not be so different.

On the other hand, JAIMEAS allows you to develop new active interfaces very quickly, and you even do not need to learn Java.