For like an hour (so, not a really long time, and nothing near SVGWeb) or so, I was working on a new SVG shim similar to SVGWeb except that it renders to VML and SVG through Raphael rather than Flash (so now I can actually brag about not having any plugins :P). Using it is somewhat simpler than SVGWeb, except that you need some replacing, but no need for a server, htcs, etc. Plus, the file is only 3.2 kb uncompressed, only 740 bytes gzipped and YUI’d. Also, it only works with rectangles and ellipses but could be somewhat easily modified to support anything that raphael does. While probably it does not work on IE (as I use linux and have no way to test), it’s an interesting concept.

It only works with pages where a SVG element is added dynamically after the page is loaded (contrasting to SVGWeb which only allows a SVG element to be added in code).

var svgroot = rshimdoc.createElementNS(null, "svg"); //you coudl also just use normal createElement("svg"), but it must be rshimdoc instead of document

svgroot.setAttribute('width',100); 
svgroot.setAttribute('height', 100);


(new RHTMLElement(html element)).appendChild(svgroot)

OR

rshimdoc.getElementById(element id).appendChild(svgroot)

So it doesn’t deviate too much from the SVG spec (just replacing document with rsvgdoc should work). And in other news, I’m moving some of my smaller works to github, so this project is also going to be hosted on GitHub.

http://github.com/antimatter15/rsvgshim/tree/master

So I don’t actually have wave yet, but for all 2 of you (likely less) who have used pygowave, an open source third party implementation of the wave protocol. So there was how I developed it, I read through the APIs and tested on pygowave. So what does VectorEditor do that svg-edit and… erm… svg-edit don’t do?

First, VectorEditor for wave is really really real time. Waaay more real time than svg-edit (not really). But VectorEdit (VectorWave might be a nice name.. I’m going to try using that name from now on in this post) transmits the data such as even while the shape is still being drawn, rotated, or moved (rotation needs work). Another nice feature is that the transitions are animated so things are even more seamless.

Another important feature is shape locking. So when someone selects a shape, it gets locked and can’t be edited by anyone else. If anyone tries, an alert box appears saying “Shape shape:5sdfwef98dfe3ssdf is locked by user antimatter15@pygowave.p2k-network.org”. svg-edit (the latter) doesn’t support moving things after they’re created so it doesn’t really matter then, and I’m quite certain the former doesn’t do any type of locking.

And lets not forget the likely most important, yet totally untested feature that seperates VectorEditor from the rest: IE support, which is inherent since it uses Raphael for rendering, but it may not be necessary since google may be making some shim-type system of hacking svg awesomeness onto IE and making the whole VectorEditor project useless.

So if you want to try it out, go to pygowave, sign up, create a wave and add the

http://jsvectoreditor.googlecode.com/

There’s the project page! If you want to try it out, the link is below. It’s only been tested on Firefox 3.0 so far, and please comment if there are any issues.

http://jsvectoreditor.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/index.html

So the issue with Adobe AIR, is that there’s no SVG support, but I have a hunch that this might support SVG, as it’s not Adobe’s fork of Webkit, but hopefully the real one :)

It has tons of awesome components like WebKit, Chromium (hope it doesn’t have that rotate bug…), Gears, GTK+, jQuery, Appcelerator SDK, NSIS, Ruby.

But this will hopefully satisfy those wishes for a Desktop version.

IE support is something really important to most users. especially with around 80% of the world still using it.

Raphael doesn’t seem that good, much worse than OnlyPaths SVG Renderer. But something that seems better is still Dojo.GFX

It supports Circles, Ellipses, Groups, Images, Lines, Draggable things, Paths, Points, Polylines, Rectangles, Text, Fonts, etc. and renders into VML, SVG and Silverlight.

It’s size isn’t too big either and there are CDNs for it. We could also learn from xDraw to design our editor.

I was experiementing with using another framework for Vector editing. So I used the relatively new Raphael framework. I wanted to use dojo.gfx, but I still don’t know how to use it without the dojo dependency. Raphael is not as powerful as dojo.gfx, or even OnlyPaths… so, it needs work.

It has many of the features in OnlyPaths, but it keeps the core showTracker() and such functions in the main script, not in the renderer. That allows the system to be simpler, and more easily cross-platform.

I’m not currently using cross-platform event handling. so it only works in Firefox for now, but converting is easy.

http://antimatter15.110mb.com/ajaxanimator/VectorEditor/opr.htm