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Implementation : The Mica Graphics Framework

In order to implement the Knowledge Web, a graphical framework is required that supports the following features :

The Mica Graphics Framework satisfies almost all of these requirements. It is a graphics library to manage all aspects of 2D graphics applications. It is completely written in JAVA, is well documented and is open-source. It provides support for advanced features such as network graph layouts, event handling and action percolation. Mica places heavy emphasis to ease of use, high-level of functionality and the ability to mix common user-interface widgets with not so common widgets and graphs. It supports inter-mingling of graphing editors, drawing editors and user interfaces. This last feature was important for the implementation of the knowledge web applications. Mica has extensive support for display lists, event handling, action dispatching, coordinate transforms and connectivity. Mica also facilitates infinite undo/redo, zoom and pan, layers and layer tabs, cut/copy/paste to/from clipboard, rulers, tool-hints, status bars, tool bars and default menus.
All the classes of the Mica framework are contained in the same package. The framework provides several default graphical components, which include shapes, connections, widgets like push buttons, tables, windows, doalogs, editors etc. The framework contains a large number of behavioral objects called event handlers which can be assigned to any graphics object. Events in Mica are objects that contain useful information about the input event that generated them. The Mica Graphics Framework may be freely downloaded from Software Farm(www.swfm.com). For more information refer to  [9].


next up previous
Next: Implementation : The Knowledge Up: The Knowledge Web1 Previous: The Knowledge Web concept
Sumathi Gopal 2002-01-21