[Tm4j-developers] RE: TM4J

[Kal A. <ka...@te...>]

Hi Gerd,

I'm cc'ing one of the lists (which should be active now). There are three
lists:

tm4...@li...
tm4...@li...
tm4...@li...

You should be able to subscribe with a message to
<listname>-re...@li... or through the project page on
sourceforge.

>
> I'd like to do some improvements of the project structure of tm4j:
>

I've been wanting to do something like this for some time now...

> - directory structure:
>
>    tm4j
>         bin      - some scripts, like ant
>         build    - this is where the compiled stuff goes to
>         etc      - configuration stuff if necessary
>         lib       - all necessary jars, including ant
>         src      - the sources
>         docs    - documentation
>
>    this follows more or less the apache project structure and is useful,
>    I guess.
>

That looks good. I would also like to use CVS to control our web-site
content. So I would suggest adding 'web' either as a top level directory or
as a subdirectory of doc (I think I would prefer 'web' to be separate from
'doc'). Additionally I would like to keep the test-case topic maps separate
from the source, so either tm4j/test or tm4j/etc/test.

> - Also I've got a build.bat and build.sh script that allows on to
> compile the
> project 'out-of-the-box'.
>

That would be good. One of the problems with TMNav is that the license for
TheBrain does not allow redistribution of the JAR file, so it would not be
possible to build that 'out-of-the-box'. However I did discover a cool
feature of Ant which enables you to conditionally compile if a class is
present, so perhaps we could make the 'out-of-the-box' build only attempt to
compile TMNav if TheBrain SDK is available ? On a related point, one of the
things I would like to do as quickly as possible is actually remove TheBrain
and replace it with a redistributable and uncrippled visualisation - do you
have any ideas ?

> - regarding the package of the persistent layer I'm not sure. At
> the moment
> this is 'org.ozoneDB.topicmap'  but it could also be
> 'com.techquila.topicmap.ozone'. Any ideas on this ?
>

That would be a good approach with minimal disruption to the existing code.
I don't have any problem with having both com.techquila.topicmap and
org.ozoneDB.topicmap packages in the source tree, but it might be nicer to
combine the two in some way.

The other would be to restructure it as:

com.techquila.topicmap.framework
com.techquila.topicmap.impl.mem
com.techquila.topicmap.impl.ozone

Which would be a little more logical and less cluttered than the current
com.techquila.topicmap tree.

So, in summary three options:

1) Don't alter either of the package names, simply maintain both in the same
CVS tree
2) Rename org.ozoneDB.topicmap to com.techquila.topicmap.ozone
3) Completely restructure the tm4j packages in some way.

On a related note, I would like to work out some way in which the same
application (such as the command-line utilities for example) can use either
the in-memory implementation or the ozone implementation transparently. I'll
have a think about this and start a separate thread when I have an idea ;-)

> - for the documentation we could use either stylebook or some in
> the ozone
> mailing list made a docbook package. stylebook is pretty easy to
> use, I don't
> now docbook.

And I've not used stylebook but I have done work with docbook before!
However, I think that if stylebook is easier to write to than docbook then
there will be less reason not to write docs - and thats a good thing - so
I'm happy to use stylebook. Can we keep a stylebook DTD and stylesheet as
part of the 'doc' subtree so that everyone uses the same versions ?

>
> Finally a question: Are there any mailing lists about topicmaps
> and similar
> topics that you would recommend ? At the moment I'm subscribed at
> xml-dev,
> but this is of course more xml related.
>

Yeah, there are two lists for topicmaps. topicmapmail is more general - a
lot of the debates there at the moment are very philosophical, but starting
a techy revolution there might not be a bad thing ;-). You can subscribe to
that list from the Infoloom website: www.infoloom.com. The other list is the
XTM working group list, which despite the name is an open forum (it has also
gone all philosophical recently...this seems to be a tendency for
discussions on the Semantic Web). That list is a yahoo groups list, so you
need to register with Yahoo to get access. The group name is: xtm-wg and
Yahoo Groups are at www.yahoogroups.com. I also firmly believe that anyone
interested in topicmaps should keep a close eye on RDF - so the W3C's
rdf-interest group is a good one to join (it tends to be pretty low
traffic).

Cheers,

Kal