[Tm4j-developers] TMNav and TM4Web

[Christoph <cf...@fo...>]

Hi kal

some thoughts about the tm4web - project.


I like the idea. And I  think it would be good for the tmnav-project 
to be part of the tm4web-thing. (I have not spoken with the other 
developers about this, so we should hear what they think.) But to me, 
it would be fine to be part of a subproject which works on all 
aspects of the accessibilty of topicmaps.

Naturally, working on all aspects of accesibilty means more, than 
working on web-related technologies.
Therefor I would prefer a name, which is "more open" to other 
directions, perhaps tmAccess or tmGate or something like this.



Some words on TMNav

TMNav consists currently of three parts.
One is the Panckoucke-Library, which offers services for frontend-applications.
You may use panckoucke to obtain a view on a fragment of a topicmap. 
This view reduces the complexitivity of topicmaps down to a model, 
which is easy to understand and suitable for ui-purposes .
Furthermore the version which is currently under developement wil 
contain code to load topicmaps assynchroniously and maintan a 
repository of all loaded maps.
We plan to add authentication and restricted access features and yes 
- i hope we will get there to support editing.
Panckoucke is currently the heart of the tmnav-project and I think 
other projects / applications / services could benefit from it as 
well.


Second, TMnav contains Kamal, a webservice which settles on 
panckoucke and delivers the panckoucke generated model to the world.

Third TMNav contains an Application, which is unfortunately usually 
referred to as TMNav as well. Using one single name for the package 
and for one part of the package,  is defintely confusing. It does not 
make it easy to understand separate things separetly.

The App is swing based . In its current state it is nothing more tham 
a playground. To me,  developing the Swing-App will lead into a 
dead-end-street, since we have to reinvent several wheels, in order 
to provide something which could be really suitable to work with. I 
hope tmnav will be ported to more powerful editing enviroments, as 
eclipse or jedit, where it could live on some time.

This is what we are currently developing. I think at least panckoucke 
and kamal could be valuable input to the so-called tm4web-project and 
I would love to  bring theese efforts together with all what is 
elsewhere under developement. And I feel,  the target should be 
broader than web....


Regards
c