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Overview
POLKA is a general purpose animation system that is particularly
well-suited to building algorithm and program animations. One of the
first foci for the system was to build animations of parallel programs
and computations, but POLKA is ideal for animating good old serial
programs too. POLKA is descended from the XTango system, but it is
far more powerful and flexible. All of our most recent development was
with POLKA, not XTango. POLKA supports color, real-time, 2 & 1/2
dimensional, smooth animations. To see examples (still frames) from
Polka animations, click on visualization
gallery. The focus of the system is on a balance of power and
ease-of-use. POLKA provides its own high-level abstractions to make
the creation of animations easier and faster than with many other
systems. Programmers need not be graphics experts to develop their
own animations.
Polka also includes an interactive, front-end called Samba. Samba is an animation interpreter that
reads one ascii command per line, then performs that animation
directive. These commands are of the form
rectangle 3 0.1 0.9 0.1 0.1 blue solid
move 3 0.5 0.0
so they are very easy to learn and use. The chief advantage of Samba
is that a program in any language can be annotated to generate these
ascii commands, thus driving a visualization of the program.
Learning about POLKA
Sample files -- See some sample files from Polka animations.
Regular documentation (postscript) and
(html)
Lite (beginner's) documentation (postscript)
-- Look at the documentation for the Polka system.
Technical
report -- A technical report describing POLKA's animation paradigm.
How it's
used -- Undergraduate algorithms course making extensive use of
POLKA and SAMBA.
Acquiring POLKA
The original version of POLKA is implemented in C++ on top of UNIX and
the X11 Window System, and it requires the Motif or Athena widget set. It
should be run on a color monitor. POLKA is available for use via
anonymous ftp from ftp.cc.gatech.edu under pub/people/stasko. To
access that place, press here.
Once you've acquired the appropriate file, uncompress it (%
uncompress polka.tar.Z) and tar it out (% tar xvf
polka.tar). This will create a directory called polka with all
the appropriate files. From there, examine the file README in that
directory and just follow the directions in it. The distribution
includes source, documentation, and a couple directories of sample
animations. The system was first put out for anonymous ftp in early 1993.
A newer Windows-native version of Polka, called PolkaW, exists as well.
PolkaW is implemented in C++ on top of Windows using
Microsoft Developer Studio 97 (MS Visual C++ v5.0). Included in the
distribution are sample executables that can be run directly,
including the Samba system. Source files are also included so that
you can create your own algorithm animations. PolkaW is available for
use via anonymous ftp from ftp.cc.gatech.edu. To acquire it, press here. The
system was first put out for anonymous ftp in October 1997.
Note from July 2011: We have not updated or supported Polka for many
years now.
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