xFunctions, by David Eck 27 October 1999 Department of Mathematics and Computer Science Hobart and William Smith Colleges 300 Pulteney Street Geneva, NY 14456, USA Email: eck@hws.edu WWW: http://math.hws.edu/eck/ (NOTE: I recompiled and repackaged xFunctions on 6 December 2012 for better compatibility with newer versions of Java. The source code is still the original, unmodified Java 1.0 code. I also made a few minor changes to the web site and some major changes to this file.) This README file accompanies the download of xFunctions, an educational Java applet/application that covers some aspects of calculus and pre-calculus mathematics. xFunctions can be freely distributed for non-commercial use. (If you find a commercial use for it, please get my permission first.) xFunctions can be found on the Web at http://math.hws.edu/xFunctions/ Please send comments to me at the above email address. The use of xFunctions is explained in the file index.html. The file using_examples.html tells you how to write examples that xFunctions will load them when it starts up. The file example_file.txt contains some examples of this sort. TO POST xFunctions ON YOUR WEB SITE: Just place the entire folder that you get when you unzip the web site download on your Web server. Note that the file xFunctions.jar contains the program, and it can be used on other web pages. You are certainly welcome to use xFunctions on your own Web pages. For instructional Web pages, I suggest using the "Launcher" version, so that students can resize the xFunctions window and can move back and forth easily between the xFunctions window and the Web page. TO RUN xFunctions AS A STANDALONE APPLICATION: If you have a Java interpreter, such as the one in Sun Microsystem's Java Development Kit (JDK) or Java Runtime Environment (JRE), you can run xFunctions as a standalone applications, instead of in a Web browser. The application version is named xFunctionsFrame, and it is one of the classes in the xFunctions.jar file. You might be able to run xFunctions simply by double-clicking the application file, xFunctions.jar. Unfortunately, you can't use files of examples when you run xFunctions in that way. To run xFunctions on the command line, you should be in the directory that contains the file xFunctions.jar. Use the command: java -jar xFucntions.jar If you have a file of examples for xFunctions to load, you can specify the file name as a command line parameter. For example, to load the file of examples that came with the xFunctions downlaod, use: java -jar xFunctions.jar example_file.txt