Announcement: JUMBO2a2 and xml-cml.org

From      owner-xml-dev@ic.ac.uk Thu Sep  3 19:45:51 1998
Date:     Thu, 03 Sep 1998 01:38:22 +0000
From:     Peter Murray-Rust <peter@ursus.demon.co.uk>
Subject:  ANNOUNCE: JUMBO2a2 and xml-cml.org

This is to announce the release of the latest snapshot of JUMBO2 (alpha2) and also the page it's located at: xml-cml.org.

xml-cml.org is the home page of the nascent Chemical Markup Forum, metamorphosing from the Open Molecular Foundation. Henry Rzepa, Steve Zara and I are involved in getting this going - hopefully more info later.

JUMBO2 is an element-oriented XML-browser, in Java/Swing. Its source is freely available with the normal sort of copyright. The architecture tries to follow the specs and anticipate the possible XML-related APIs. The tension between time available and achievement is evident; there are many bits not fully finished, but I felt there was a sufficient shortage of 'browsers' that you will forgive the buglets.

JUMBO2 is offered to the community as a catalyst to spawn the creation of high-quality client-side tools ('browsers'). Ideally we converge towards a set of core APIs and all that remains of my code will be the elephant-specific stuff. I have already started to get some offers of help.

At present JUMBO2:

uses SAX and a range of parsers
uses Swing (tree, table, text, and various windows/widgets). Of these the text is the worst to make work - not just my opinion.
has a namespace kludge (<?jumbo:namespace?> to provide per-element functionality. This allows a variety of client-side processes:
- validation (e.g., for data values)
- transformation of complex objects (e.g. molecules)
- creation of element-specific rendering (forms, etc.)
- vector graphics (embryonic, but so is Java until we get Java2D - I'm told JDK1.2beta4 is rather buggy)
- other authoring/editing functionality
has a per-element stylesheet table editable by the reader, and a number of default styles
can analyse the elements/attributes/values in the tree and navigate to them
is not well documented

The latest *.jar is mounted and the *.java should be posted soon. Follow the WWW site for incremental announcements. I haven't distributed much in the way of ex maples - there are some simple data files including graphics. Jon Bosak's Shakespeare works very well. I hope to develop the styletable approach to support things like rec.xml - you are welcome to play.

Since this is an alpha release I'd be very grateful for bug-reports, but not beginners' questions.

[I had expected that JUMBO would have been overtaken by commercial client-side browsers by now, but get the sad impression that client-side XML is not being addressed as excitingly as it could. (The idea of using XML server-side to generate PDF is underwhelming as a global revolution). There are so many really exciting things we can do with client-side tools - I would be very grateful to have more offers of help. JUMBO is critical for some of the things I need to do and I haven't yet seen much alternative. At the least I hope we can come up with some useful APIs.]

Peter Murray-Rust, Director Virtual School of Molecular Sciences,
domestic net connection
VSMS http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms
Virtual Hyperglossary http://www.venus.co.uk/vhg

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