Ideas and Disappointments
Sunday 26 April 2009 at 12:53 pm I am just coming from the second-best place to find new ideas – the shower. And while I was standing there, thinking about my soon ending diploma-thesis, a quite interesting idea came into my mind. Because the current state of the Dawn WebViewer is nothing but a dynamic HTML representation, it could also be used for a new feature – a HTML export for GMF-diagrams. This can be implemented very easy. In fact the communication fragment only needs to hold the JavaScript Figures and the diagram need an extra menu entry for the export.So I checked whether GMF still can export to HTML. Surely such feature exists, and with the SVG export a quite cool one. So this was my disappointment of the day.
Then I started to let my mind whirl around. The advantage of the Dawn version is, that the JavaScript based implementation allows it to edit the diagram in a browser. In fact this is the based for the planned WebEditor. This also could work in a browser if no network connection is available. This means some sort of an Offline-WebEditor. Sounds strange? Indeed.
Then my mind, out of control, continued. Such Offline-WebEditor could be used on clients (mobile or not) where no Eclipse is installed. If one would add some features like XMI-serialization this would lead to an web-based GMF Editor without the need for Eclipse or GMF….O.k. I’ll better stop this here and try to focus on finishing my thesis.
Have a nice Sunday ;)