Building mind map based webapp. Not sure which framework to choose

Question

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:

1. Time frame for project - about 3 months, give or take 2-3 weeks
2. Learning curve for framework - should be easy (Very relative term indeed..In the context, we are familiar with VB6, PHP, Javascript and Core Java)
3. Necessary graphics related features supported - such as whiteboard, drag-drop widgets, animations(need not be fancy stuff) etc.
4. 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.

Answer 1

You are kind off answering your own question. Use vaadin it will be a little extra work but then your saving huge amount of time on the mindmap coding.

Answer 2

Disclaimer: I'm a member of the Vaadin Team, and do not know Silverlight very well.

I believe both Silverlight and Vaadin would be good candidates for your application, and for both the biggest challenge will be the client-side implementation of the visual mind-map component.

I took a quick look at XMind and it seems to be Swing based, so I'm afraid that the only way to re-use that would be to wrap the mapping component into an applet. You can easily do this with Vaadin, but it will require the Java plugin in the browser.

If you consider implementing the mindmap component without plugins, you have the following options:

• Use the Vaadin core components (eg. the Tree, live example here) to visualize the mind map. Vaadin supports drag & drop, so this would be very fast to implement, and you would need to work with only server side Java stuff.
• Create a HTML5 component with Vaadin integration for the mind-map. You can do this with the HTML5 canvas, and wrapping it in a Vaadin component is easy, but it'll require that you code the component with GWT. There are several examples on how to manipulate the canvas with Vaadin and GWT.
• Create a SVG component with Vaadin integration for the mind-map. As far as I know SVG supports interactive stuff a little better than Canvas, and there are examples on how to interact with SVG using GWT and Vaadin. Note that the support for SVG is lacking especially with the older IE versions.

All of these options are feasible to implement within your timeframe (depending on what extra functionality you want). The first option is by far the easiest to do, but it might not be fancy enough for your requirements.

We have strived to make Vaadin as easy to learn and use as possible, and I daresay that our documentation is very good. In addition we have a very lively community filled with helpful experts. If you need more information on Vaadin just come over to our forums and we'll help you out.