[Tm4j-developers] TMNav

[assante <chr...@ha...>]

Hi,

this is my first posting to this list, so Hello to you all.



Some months ago, I volunteered to start the developement of tmnav as 
a graphical user interface to tm4j.

The last weeks I finished a small prototype. I've just checked the 
sources into the cvs as a new module, called tmnav.
If you prefer to download a binary, you can do so at my site 
(http://www.folge2.de/work/tmnav/download.php). This link will remain 
valid, until we find a better location for the binary distribution.

The prototype has no big functionality. You can open a map and browse 
through part of the structure.


I publish it at this stage for two reasons:

1. Getting some attention for the project.

2. Getting feedback and collect ideas.


There are a few fundamental open questions and maybe some of you have 
input on theese.


- How to implement tmnav. As a standalone-application? An alternative 
may be an "eclipse plugin". Does someone has some deeper experience 
with eclipse? The advantage of eclipse would be to get a lot of 
prebuild infrastructure for free.
Furthermore, integration of topicmaps into the developement process 
may be a real benefit for developers.


- What visualisation toolkit to use. Currently I'm using touchgraph. 
Kal proposed to check out JGraph as well. Does anyone know 
alternatives?
Clearly, there should be a swing based form for the most important 
element types (topics, associations...)


- What JDK to use. I vote for 1.4 , but perhaps there are arguments against.


Regards
Christoph