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Principia

Principia is an educational physics playground emphasizing visualizations and interactability.

This web-based project is designed to helps students reinforce key concepts through visualizing physical scenarios. A user can build a system by dragging and dropping elements like ramps, pulleys, or springs into a frame in their browser. Then the simulation can be run to see the elements interact with each other over time, with the ability to pause the simulation at any point and query the state of an element. Users can also save their simulations and share them with others.

Principia serves as a powerful supplement to any physics classroom or as a playground that would allow students to further explore concepts in a visually exciting way.

Getting Started:

  • Download and Install Go 1.5
    • Note: If you already have an older version of Go, uninstall the previous version first!
    • If you use Vim and want syntax highlighting for Go, add the contents of the .vim folder found here to ~/.vim/
  • Download and Install the Google App Engine SDK for Go
    • Note: The Go SDK depends on Python 2.7, so make sure you have python 2.7 installed
    • Here's what I did on my Mac:
      • Download the zip file of the SDK and extract it.
      • I moved the extracted folder, go_appengine, to /usr/local/
      • I added export PATH="/usr/local/go_appengine:${PATH}" to the bottom ~/.bash_profile
      • Restart Terminal for changes to take effect
  • If already have this git repository cloned, navigate to the root principia directory:
    • git pull
  • Otherwise:
    • git clone http://github.com/samolds/principia.git to wherever you want this source code
  • If everything is working right, run goapp serve from the root of the principia directory and then go to localhost:8080 to see the development server running
  • Use Ctrl-C to kill the server when you're done

Development Best Practices

  • Before committing, run gofmt -w . to format all Go files to standard (only necessary if working with Go files).
  • Make sure to leave Commit message
  • Frequent, small commits are preferred over large commits
  • When working on a new feature make sure to work, commit, and push on a new branch. When finished, submit a Pull Request to merge changes back into master

Deploying Changes

View information about the app in the Developer's Console, then select "theprincipiaxyz" from the dropdown.

This is how you will push changes to the live site. Obviously, use care to make sure what is being deployed is thorougly tested and isn't going to break anything. This command will push all of the code you have locally up to Google App Engine, and ultimately principia.cc. For best practice, make sure to only deploy when on the production branch.

To merge everything currently on master to production after deploying

  • git checkout master
  • git pull
  • git checkout production
  • git rebase master

Warning - Caution - Be Careful

  • Be at the root of the project
  • make sure git branch says production
  • make sure git status returns no known changes
  • goapp deploy

Project Structure

/principia
    app.yaml               -    Used for basic project settings with Google App Engine
    controllers/           -    All of the business logic for web pages
    lib/                   -    Any extra go utilities we would like to use
    misc/                  -    Random project files not actually necessary for web app
    models/                -    The schemas for the database
    routes.go              -    What urls point to which controllers
    static/                -    Static HTML resources
        css/               -    All CSS stuff goes here
        font/              -    All font related stuff goes here
        img/               -    All images used go here
        js/                -    All Javascript goes here
            lib/           -    Any Javascript libraries like JQuery and PhysicsJS
            simulator/     -    All code used to support the Simulator
    views/                 -    The HTML pages that are rendered by the controllers

Useful Links: