We are working on a Mind map based webapp as our final year college project. It will be a website where users will be able to create mind maps collaboratively. The user interface will be very similar to what https://bubbl.us/beta/ and hxxp://www.mindmeister.com/ have.
In a nutshell, the users will have access to whiteboard and drawing tools to create mind maps on a whiteboard. The changes made by one user will be visible to other session users. e.g. A session has three users A, B and C. If A changes mind map, it will be visible on whiteboards of B and C.
We were considering Flex, Openlaszlo few days ago but having limited time (about 3 months) for project completion, we binned those. For Flex we will have to learn Actionscript3 and for Openlaszlo there is no IDE support. So both of them won't be good choices.
We have shortlisted Silverlight and Vaadin frameworks as viable choices but we are confused as we don't have any experience with either of them. We need to take these points into consideration while selecting a framework:
- Time frame for project - about 3 months, give or take 2-3 weeks
- Learning curve for framework - should be easy (Very relative term indeed..In the context, we are familiar with VB6, PHP, Javascript and Core Java)
- Necessary graphics related features supported - such as whiteboard, drag-drop widgets, animations(need not be fancy stuff) etc.
- Availability of tutorials and good documentation
There are 2 open source mind mapping applications that can be useful for this webapp.
- Silverlight - hxxp://silverdraw.codeplex.com/ (a webapp) - More like a POC design.
- Java - hxxp://www.xmind.net/ (a desktop app) - Most of the mindmapping features we need are present. If we use Vaadin, we can re-use some code which is a huge plus point.
We are open to other suitable frameworks. Which framework would you choose?
P.S.: Excuse for obscure URLs'. New users are limited to only one hyperlink.