dojo.gfx hits svn head
Posted by Gavin Doughtie Tue, 15 Aug 2006 01:46:00 GMT
dojo.gfx, the normalized vector-drawing API for SVG and VML that I've been helping with is now in the head of the dojo subversion repository.
There's a fair amount of work still to be done, particularly to get VML looking right, but iit's ready for brave javascript hackers to start playing with
See http://dojotoolkit.org/developers/ for details on grabbing the trunk svn code. There's a single test file (tests/gfx/test_gfx.html) that should help you get started, and ongoing chatter on the dojo-contributors list if you want to keep an eye on the status.
Nice! Will this be in the next release of dojo?
Not in the 3.x branch, hopefully in 4.x, most likely 5.0. The API should be reasonably stable for a while if you want to play with it.
Is it more or less advanced than RichDraw ? http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog/2006/04/richdraw-simple-vmlsvg-editor/
We're aiming to expose any functionality that can possibly be delivered reliably in both IE and the SVG-enabled browsers. Take a look at the test_gfx.html to see what we're trying to get done for the first release -- it includes several things (curves, gradients) that RichDraw and xdraw didn't get around to implementing. As far as a drawing editor object goes, I'll be porting the xdraw SVG editor to use dojo.gfx.
I didn't find your email on your blog, so I post a comment here. I began to write a whiteboard application at the beginning of the month, purely SVG based at the beginning, and decided to switch to the new dojo.gfx API for the rendering. For the moment, it doesn't work in IE (as I have no windows computer, it's a little bit hard to debug with that beast), but I plan to improve that situation. In fact, it must work, as it seems that the element I'm using (just "Path" element) are supported in IE with the dojo.gfx API but I haven't found yet how to make it to work. Moreover, as my understanding of the Dojo and especially the dojo.gfx package will grow, the code will be clever. I'm not really satisfied by the current state, but, hey, it works. Here is the URL of the project : http://whiteboard.novelys.com/
Hey, that's cool! What are you using for your network IO?
As for the moment I have not enough time to investigate Comet, it's simply AJAX polling easily added thanks to Prototype. And, in fact I'm quite satisified about it. The network overhead is enough minimal to not really bothering me.
Also check this out. Works in IE only for now www.cumulatelabs.com/draw
The cumulatelabs.com demo is really slick -- I hope the creators will join in on the dojo.gfx (and upcoming dojo.gfx.editor) projects.