RE: [Tm4j-developers] Towards 0.5

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

>
> > Its been a while since a TM4J release and I feel that we have made some
> > major progress that it would be good to get announced and
> released. I would
> > like to draw up a list of things to do prior to an 0.5 release.
> Here is my
> > shortlist:
> >
> > 	1) Documentation: Just a basic developer's guide and some
> user docs for the
> > tools
> > 	2) Stabilise the TMNav application: It has been really
> buggy for a while -
> > I've tracked down the cause of most of the error messages generated by
> > TheBrain SDK and I think that the intermittent crashes are to do with
> > deadlocks in AWT event processing which it might be possible to fix by
> > splitting the application into separate top-level windows.
> > 	3) Complete the Provider/Manager interface
>
> I'd like the improve the ozone implementation, but I will not be
> able to this
> within the next three weeks. Also some docu for the ozone stuff
> would be good.
>

We could label the ozone package as "experimental" for the 0.5 release.
Perhaps I could write some really basic documentation for people to be able
to get a topic map database up and running (that would be a useful exercise
for me).


> > I'm going to be travelling and working away for much of this month, but
> > hopefully will have some time while on the road to work on (1)
> and (2) and
> > to make any changes necessary for (3). Once I get back I'll
> have some free
> > time to finish off, so I'm tentatively planning on making 0.5
> before the end
> > of the month.
> >
> > However, this means that a few things will probably not make the cut for
> > 0.5. Such as:
> > 	1) Index of *all* topic map objects by ID
> > 	2) Implementing the duplicate suppression rules of XTM
> > 	3) Implementing a different Open Source-based visualisation
> for TMNav
> >
> > (1) and (2) I will try and do if there is time. (3) I'm playing
> with ideas
> > for but don't even have a concrete design in mind at this
> stage, so it is
> > almost certain to be left undone.
>
> I've done a web based interface with Cocoon2, but it's very application
> specfic. I'm not sure if a HTML based solution would be the right for a
> general TMNav solution. I had also some ideas for a graph based interface
> as we have it now, but I'll have to think about it again.
>

I would be interested to hear your ideas - I've been playing with a pinwheel
tree display in Jazz - though I haven't got very far with that yet.
Visualisations are pretty tricky for topic maps. One thing I would like to
do is completely overhaul the TMNav framework and clean it up. The original
idea with TMNav was that it would support pluggable components in an
MVC-style framework. Unfortunately, when I started that I didn't have the
event mechanism in the TopicMapObject interface so it got very messy. I
think redesigning that framework from the ground up and implementing a
couple of different visualisations within that framework would be a good
goal for 0.6.

Cheers,

Kal