First of all, hi again!
I'm developing the collaborative business drawing framework to integrate on
XWiki and currently need some feedback.
In order to provide the abillity of drawing SVG/VML/Canvas objects in the
browser, this framework has many options that i shall explain:
*
A) Tatami, the GWT wrapper of the Dojo Toolkit library (
http://code.google.com/p/tatami/)*This is by far the most used option, and the reasons are somewhat obvious.
- It wraps up the dojo toolkit code for GWT providing access to the GFX
package's functionalities and thus giving us the possibility to draw objects
in SVG/VML/Canvas. This is a very important point as it provides support for
Safari with canvas objects and IE with VML objects, accomplishing thus a
better product.
- Provides the creation of basic and advanced drawing figures from
squares to paths with drag and drop, scale, rotate and parameters
specification.
- It has the biggest active developer's base, having a lot of activity on
their forum (
http://groups.google.com/group/tatami)
- It gives us efficiency and usability by being well developed.
Personally, this is a key point for me as i've seen a lot of svg drawing
boards slow and badly done.
A demo of the tatami can be found here (
http://tatami.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/site/samples/TatamiDemo/index.html )
but don't mind the slow reaction of the site as it's using aloot of dojo
objects(Fisheye, etc) and it's runing from the svn. After some coding with
it, i realized it can indeed be very fast.
IMHO, this looks like the winner.. we should use this wrapper for the job
and if necessary develop some new items on it to provide us the required
functionalities, which will also be needed in any other option.
*B) JSGraphic's library (
http://www.walterzorn.com/jsgraphics/jsgraphics_e.htm)
*As it's the case with Dojo Toolkit, this library can be used in GWT by
including a wrapper on the project. The downsides of this alternative are
obvious as, for example, it doesn't support's drag and drop or any
interaction with the objects and is a one man project.
It's allways good to have options heh!
*C) Develop an API fit to the job*
As this option might bring some (? small) benefits in efficiency and
additional funcionalities, on the other hand, it's slowed by the time
required to develop the API knowing that there are some fully functional
good options out there.
Talking about functionalities, Tatami provides every svg object and property
that i remind me of and it's efficiency and usability are high, so there
shouldn't be much more to do in this area. (besides implementating screw
transformations, which aren't included in the latest realease of Tatami :)
In the next days i'll be building a propotype of a drawing API so please
give me your opinions.
My vote : +1 Tatami
Best Regards,
Miguel Bento.
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