[Lessonbuilder-devel] JSVGEditor and presentation program available

[<sc...@do...>]

Hello Everyone,

Over the past year, the Global Circle of Knowledge project has spent a lot
of time developing and building an open-source "Lesson Builder Program" --
essentially a presentation program designed around Batik/SVG.  One of the
core components of that is a SVG Editor component built atop JSVGCanvas.

The JSVGEditor is designed to be a relatively small core-codebase, with most
functionality implemented via ModeHandlers.  Currently, there are
ModeHandlers for selecting/scaling/moving objects, rotating objects,
creating rectangles, squares, circles, and ellipses, drawing polylines,
drawing freehand SVGPaths, working with text, and zooming-in and -out of the
work area.  It is not difficult to create ModeHandlers to add custom
functionality for your own apps (e.g., the WhiteBoard thing someone
mentioned earlier).

There is also support for grouping/ungrouping objects, flipping x/y, moving
objects to front and to back, cut/copy/paste/delete (across components /
documents), undo/redo, and even some preliminary support for font formatting
(face, size, color, style) on text.



The LessonBuilder project also includes support for storing multiple SVGs
-- and the external objects they depend upon -- into a single package (i.e.,
a presentation: a "Lesson") and reloading and working on that package later. 
It also includes the ability to import slides from other Lessons, and
drag-and-drop support for adding objects into JSVGEditors.  There's even
some preliminary code for Audio and Video extensions for Batik.


Available via CVS from:

:pserver:ano...@cv...:/cvsroot/lessonbuilder

modules:
	"svgeditor": standalone JSVGEditor component, and support classes
	"LessonBuilder": full LessonBuilder presentation package




Now I have a request: these Java components / applications need a new
maintainer.

These have all been developed as a part of the Global Circle of Knowledge
educational project.  However, fundamentally we are here to get education to
the poor people of the world who do not currently have access to much (if
any) schooling.  Think of it as the educational analog to Open Source. ;-)

Since we are in the 'business' of creating an educational system, not a new
presentation system, we have switched our design model to build on top of
OpenOffice.  Thus, much of the code we have created over the last year is no
longer of relevance to our work -- but it is still good code in its own
right.

I and my development team will be quite happy to assist anyone taking over
development of this work.  I acknowledge that it needs some more cleanup
(though I've spent a fair bit of time cleaning it up already), but overall
we are talking about a very flexible and scalable editing package, and a
pretty decent (if still weak) presentation package.

The Global Circle of Knowledge will continue on the path to educating the
poor people of the world, we just have to take a different approach to doing
so.  I hope the community will appreciate and make use of the code we have
created, but that choice fundamentally is up to you -- check it out and see
for yourself how accurate and meaningful my claims above really are.


Thank you all for your great work.  Batik really was a wonderful platform
from which we could work.  We will even continue using Batik later (albeit
in a different vein ;-).


All the best,
Bibek

Technical Lead
Global Circle of Knowledge
http://www.globalcircle.org/