karmac0ma - Slashdot User

Submission + - Google unleashes Wave on developers (zdnet.co.uk)

Submitted by

superglaze

on Thursday May 28, 2009 @02:09PM

superglaze writes: "Google has unveiled a distributed, P2P-based collaboration and conversation platform called Wave. Developers are being invited to join an open source project that has been formed to create a Google Wave Federation Protocol, which will underlie the system.

Anyone will be able to create a "wave", which is a type of hosted conversation, Google has said. Waves will essentially incorporate real-time dialogue, photos, videos, maps, documents and other information forms within a single, shared communications space.

Developers can also work on embedding waves into websites, or creating multimedia robots and gadgets that can be incorporated within the Google Wave client."

Submission + - Lightweight C++ library for SVG using GDI+ (arosmagic.com) 1

Submitted by redblue on Thursday May 28, 2009 @12:26PM

redblue writes: I would like to display vector graphics in my Windows C++ programs with minimal system requirements. Some of the possibilities are: 1. Enhanced Metafile Format format/EMF+, 2. Flash/SWG, 3. Silverlight/XAML, 4. SVG. The non-open proprietary nature of #2 & #3 make them unattractive. Since EMF+ is not amenable to easy editing, it leaves SVG as the only format worth pursuing. The trouble is that the major vendors have a lock on the market with their proprietary formats; leaving SVG high and dry with no easy native OS support. At least not on Windows. From what I could learn on the intertubes, Cairo is the best, if not only, reasonable system that may enable compiled SVG support. Unfortunately, AFAIK, it comes with a price tag of >2MB overhead and the C++ bindings are not straightforward.

In a flash of the NIH syndrome, I rolled my own SVG processing engine and it has addressed my needs. You can see the result on http://www.arosmagic.com/Solitaire. A simple breakdown is: Framework+CRT(150K), SVG engine(100k), SVG art(350k). My SVG library is sufficient for me for now. But I can't help wonder:
1. Is there a better SVG library out there already available for easy inclusion?
2. If not, is there a need, i.e. market demand, for a lightweight (~200K) C++ SVG library that does not have the baggage of Silverlight or Flash?

If the answers are No/Yes, it may be worth it to make this library fully SVG compliant and release it as an open source alternative to the offerings from the entities that we shall not name but just collectively refer to as The Microbe. Please help out by letting me know if such a component is something that you would personally want to use in your current/future projects.

Comment Re:Processing / "Visualizing Data" (Score 3, Interesting) 46

by karmac0ma on Thursday May 28, 2009 @01:21AM (#28119501) Attached to: Beginning Python Visualization

There's already something very close to Processing using Python, BSD licensed, even though it's OSX only: Nodebox (http://www.nodebox.net/).

On the other hand, there's a GPL fork/port of this project that works on GNU/Linux and Windows -- Shoebot (http://www.tinkerhouse.net/shoebot) (Disclosure: i'm one of the authors)

Nodebox uses Cocoa as its graphics back-end, while Shoebot uses Cairo (http://www.cairographics.org/); our plans for it are to implement other graphics back-ends including OpenGL (via Pyglet or Pygame), so seeing the parent open-source their Python/OpenGL project would be a godsend to us. Hey, there's common goals and all, so no reason to keep it closed, right? ;-)

(do pardon me if the links come out wrong, it's my first post over here -- bonjour to all)

Slashdot Top Deals