Re: [Rails-devel] Support Needed: New complex Tiles and Maps

[John A. T. <ja...@ja...>]

On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 9:34 AM, brett lentz <bre...@gm...> wrote:

> The main reason I chose SVG, was because it meant that we weren't tied to
> just using Swing for our UI. Way back in the early days of the project,
> Erik did some very preliminary prototyping to demonstrate that a web-based
> UI was also possible and even desirable.
>

I'm not positive SVG is the way to go for a web-based app - personally, I
would probably use sprited images downloaded from the server.  Particularly
if you are going to reuse the Java codebase and compile with GWT, as you
get the compile-time spriting for free.

I still believe that supporting the potential for more than the current
> Swing UI is nice-to-have. But, I think a flexible tile definition that can
> be used to render the tiles in a desire format also fits that requirement
> just as easily as using SVG for the tile graphics themselves.
>

The rendering API that would have to be implemented is things like arcs,
circles, transformed text, etc, so you should be able to draw it using
Java2D or SVG or pretty much anything with basic drawing APIs.

-- 
John A. Tamplin