Comparison of Various Technologies Used in a Virtual Laboratory

The usage of remotely accessible sources increases in education. On one hand, there are passive sources as electronic libraries, scanned books and webservers allowing cooperative production of education materials. On the other hand, there are virtual laboratories allowing participating of users on the conducted experiments. The server side and client side parts of virtual laboratories can be based on various technologies; the aim of this paper is to give a kind of comparison of several of them. The paper also introduces an approach to the laboratory models with extended use that can be used in both ways, as remotely accessed models allowing only a limited control and as locally accessed models allowing full control. Because of the limited length of the paper, the aim is not to provide a complete survey through all possible technologies usable to the virtual laboratories development, but to provide the practical experience with an implementation of some of them.