About this Software

Introduction

This software was developed whilst at the University of Technology, Sydney for teaching Kinetics in the Department of Chemistry, Materials and Forensic Science.

How does it work?

This program is web based and will run on any modern graphical web browser. When you enter input data for a Monte Carlo simulation and click the Start Reaction button to commence the simulation the web browser submits your request as a HTML form to another computer running a web server. That web server runs a CGI script which does the calculations and returns the results to you as another form - ready to be filled out again with new parameters and submitted.

What's it written in and what runs it?

The CGI script is written in a programming language called Perl and runs on a low end Intel processor (233MHz and 32Meg RAM) running a Linux/GNU operating system with the Apache Web Server. This PC provides sufficient computational power for the Monte Carlo calculations for about four users. Most of the delay that you will notice is your Web Browser rendering the graphics rather than the server doing the Monte Carlo simulation.

The Introduction and Theory sections are typeset using LaTeX and automatically converted into HTML using latex2html. This generates the gif images of the equations that you see in the text. The gif images of the simulations are created using the GNU Plotting Utilities package. Total lines of code for the simulation scripts is around 2,800 lines, although there is considerable reuse of code between the scripts. Total lines of HTML code is about 1,200 lines.

Perl, Linux and the Apache Web Server are open source software as are LaTeX and latex2html.

This Kinetics software is also open source and released under the GNU copyright. A copy is available here.

Michael Lake
email: MikeL@speleonics.com.au Web: http://www.speleonics.com.au/mikes/
August 2001

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