Since the late 1990s, we have been developing highly interactive "applets" designed to help teach a wide variety of basic concepts in atmospheric sciences. Initially, we chose Java as the basis for this development -- it was then a technology that promised "write once, run everywhere". Having the ability to run such applets in a wide variety of web browsers had strong appeal.

In the late 2000's, however, with the release of ActionScript 3, we began to move into the world of Flash, in order to overcome some of the issues and limitations we had struggled with using Java.

In the past year, certain types of mobile computing devices that cannot run either Java or Flash have become extremely popular. We have, therefore, started moving to the emerging "HTML5 Standard" for creating these interactive applets.

We will share our experiences and some of the hard lessons learned along the way.