Creating an Online Diagramming Tool.

Question

Recently i have thought of setting myself the task of creating a basic digramming tool that would be web based and would like some input from other programmers and developers with more experience that myself.

I have stumbled upon this Site that offers an amazing piece of software and was wondering how they went about creating such a thing. For example, what languages and library's do you think were used to create a webApp like that. I have been looking at GWT for my project as i do like programming in Java, Would GWT be able to create a basic webapp for diagrams or would a RIA language like adobe flex be a better choice?

Thanks for any input.

Answer 1

As Igor said Blueprint is an excellent example of the power of GWT with the help of other libraries can do that task.

Incidentally I am also investigating the same problem at the moment.

I found that if using GWT the following project serves as a great base for such projects and is part of bigger products like the open source BPM modeler (excuse me I forgot the name) : GWT - Diagrams

They have a demo link there which is worth the time to take a look at.

Answer 2

Mostly depends on how you want your end product to behave. Something like Flex - or even Flash, perhaps Flex isn't necessary - could accomplish this, but the answer to the question of "should it" can only be answered by you :) Do you merely need simple boxes and figures to be drawn, or will these be animated at some point?

Actionscript also has a lot of open-source libraries and utilities that can get you part of the way there, from layout tools that can automatically sort and position display objects, to drawing frameworks, to this:

http://www.objecthandles.com/