A dressed up version and a dressed down API version. The latter shows some sample code to configure your own web interface or embed just some of the diagrams on your own web page. See also the API for other environments than a web-browser.
To get a proof of concept a force graph example with originally v3 of D3.js was changed into tiny thread an pair diagrams diagrams with the following steps:
- Replaced the server side JSon with the hard-coded js/sample.js assembled from a manual sketch js/sample.png.
- Applied arrow heads and flattened them to line ends to emulate a color coded pair diagrams or to emulate the over/under effect in thread diagrams. Later versions create the over/under effect with shortened lines, for better browser support and performance, a too complicated approach for the multiple colors of a color coded diagram.
- Made nodes transparent except for bobbins.
- Assigned the thread number as a class to each section of a thread to assign colors.
- Turned the links from lines to paths with a third node to add mid-markers for twist marks.
- Initial coordinates replace the default random values, thus the animation stabalizes much quicker and it prevents rotated and flipped diagrams.
Scientific research presented at TesseLace resulted in patterns defined by matrices.
These patterns are alternatives for the js/sample.js used for the proof of concept.
GroundForge uses a compact matrix format using a character to tag a node.
The character defines the composition of incoming pairs of the node.
The class TesselaceThumbs generated the SVG versions of the images for the TesseLace index.
A batch script with InkScape exports converted these images into PNG.
The diagrams lack the original geometric information after completion of the animation,
so topological duplicates were merged into single images.
The geometric variations are provided via a link, they can be downloaded as SVG documents
and customised into intermediate and other variations that are not bound to a square grid.
The matrices are converted to node and link objects to define pair diagrams. The D3jsSVG object turns these nodes and links to the initial SVG documents. The geometric information within the matrices is used for the initial coordinates of the nodes. JSon data generated from these node and link objects provides a hook for the D3js library to adjust the coordinates of the nodes.
The thread diagrams are generated from the nodes and links of the pair diagram. Each node is replaced with a set of linked nodes as defined by the sequence of twist and cross actions. To keep track of the threads while constructing the diagram, the algorithm figures out a working order to create the lace just like a real lace maker does.
Safari nor Internet Explorer support <input type="color">. The free color-picker works on both platforms and was easy to apply.
- The pages in the docs directory don't require any compilation
- To compile
src/main/scalato JavaScript: sbt 0.13.9 or higher - To execute the tests: maven
The community edition of IntelliJ seems a better IDE for Scala development than Eclipse.
- Fork the project and make a local clone.
- Don't push to your own master branch, but use the following work flow
- add the parent of your fork as remote to your local repository, by convention this remote is called blessed
- fetch the master branch of the blessed repository
- create topic a branch from the tip of the master branch
- push your changes to your own fork and create a pull request
- Compile your changes and copy the result from the root of the local project:
- windows:
sbt fullOptJS && copy /Y target\scala-2.11\groundforge-opt.js docs\js\GroundForge-opt.js - *nix:
sbt fullOptJS && cp -f target/scala-2.11/groundforge-opt.js docs/js/GroundForge-opt.js
- windows:
- Check the results with the
docs/*.htmlpages - If ok (or need advise from a reviewer): commit, push and create a pull request
- travis may report some of the internal link problems on the help pages in
docs/help - Optional (if you know how to meddle with branches as your own master branch
will get another history than the parent repository):
- configure your local fork to deploy
docsathttp://YOURID.github.io/GroundForge/ - after merging with your own master branch you can check your own version of the site.
- configure your local fork to deploy
Never catch exceptions in a Try as exceptions terminate the JavaScript. The tests might succeed with maven, but the JavaScript breaks. Prevent exceptions like illegal arguments and indexes and create a Failure for safe execution with JavaScript.
The applied Scala coding techniques are explained by this course up and including workshop 3. The main code doesn't use any io, and the hand full of files written by test/demo classes don't justify using a library. So you can save the last task of the FileIO assignment for other purposes.
Use mvn clean test to run unit tests. As some tests read pattern links from help files using java-io, the test fail with SBT.
Maven is much faster but uses JVM while the JS used by SBT is the actual target environment.
Some classes under src/test are suffixed with Demos rather than Spec these runnable objects create SVG documents in a target/test directory for a visual check.
For manual tests of the html pages in the docs directory (and help pages after publishing) on other browsers and devices than your own you could signup at