A Java-based system for building animated presentations over the Web

We describe Leonardo Web, a collection of tools for building animated presentations that can be useful for teaching, disseminating, and e-learning. Presentations can be created via the combined use of a visual editor and a Java library. The library allows it to generate animations in a batch fashion directly from Java code according to an imperative specification style. Batch-generated animations can then be refined and customized using the editor. Presentations can be finally viewed with a simple Java player, which ships both as a stand-alone application for off-line deployment and as a Java applet embedded in a Web page. The player supports step-by-step and continuous execution, reversibility, speed selection, and smooth animation. (C) 2004 Published by Elsevier B.V.