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Current Version

Stable: 0.9.8 (April 2009)

Development: 0.10.0-SNAPSHOT through SVN and Maven only (June 2009)

What is ZVTM ?

Current Graphical User Interface toolkits like Swing are powerful, generic and portable, but cannot be used for some generic application classes such as graph editors, requiring programmers to use lower-level APIs such as Java2D which are more expressive but harder to use.

ZVTM is a Zoomable User Interface (ZUI) toolkit implemented in Java, designed to ease the task of creating complex visual editors in which large amounts of objects have to be displayed, or which contain complex geometrical shapes that need to be animated. It is based on the metaphor of universes that can be observed through smart movable/zoomable cameras, and offers features such as perceptual continuity in object animations and camera movements, which should make the end-user's overall experience more pleasing.

ZVTM features a graphical object model that makes the task of creating, modifying and animating graphical entities easier, allows the definition of custom shapes, all through a simple API. ZVTM also features smooth zooming capabilities (2.5D/zoomable user interface), multiple independent layers inside a single viewport, multi-threaded views, and support for exporting SVG documents. It has been used for instance to develop IsaViz, a visual browser/editor for RDF that represents models as zoomable 2D graphs.

ZVTM is the continuation of a project that I initiated with Jean-Yves Vion-Dury at Xerox Research Centre Europe during my PhD. It was then called the XVTM (Xerox Visual Transformation Machine). ZVTM builds upon the XVTM and is distributed under the LGPL license as was the XVTM.

Why use ZVTM ?

• ZVTM is able to manage a large amount of objects efficiently.

• The underlying model is based on the metaphor of universes that can be observed through smart movable/zoomable cameras. Such paradigms:

  • are useful because they simplify the construction and layout(infinite universes called virtual spaces)

  • are powerful because they allow to maintain a good perception of the context (smooth and continuous motion/zoom).

• Objects are defined by visual attributes such as position, size, orientation, shape and color. When the programmer modifies the values of visual attributes, graphical representations are automatically updated (the programmer does not have to worry about the various painting operations).

• ZVTM features animation capabilities: each visual attribute modification can be animated through various temporal schemes (using Sun's Timing Framework since version 0.10.0).

• ZVTM provides support for multi-layered views and object transparency (editable alpha channel). Objects can be seen through several views simultaneously.

• Since version 0.9.6, different types of magnification lenses (Sigma Lenses) can be associated with views, thus enabling various focus + context representations.

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Some applications using ZVTM

World Browser		IsaViz	Blast2GO
Navigating in a multi-scale version of NASA's Blue Marble Next Generation World Map with Geonames data and ESRI shapefiles overlaid on top of it. A probing lens magnifies Massachusetts in context.	Air traffic network of the main 232 airports and 690 heaviest routes on the same map (86 400 x 43 200 pixels decomposed into a pyramid of 2 730 tiles 1 350 x 1 350 each)	A visual authoring tool for Semantic Web data (RDF)	A universal Gene Ontology annotation, visualization and analysis tool for functional genomics research
ZGRViewer A GraphViz/DOT viewer featuring many aids to navigation in large networks.	UIST Explorer A multi-scale interface for navigating in 20 years of papers published at ACM UIST (578 PDF documents, typically 4-to-10 page long)		VXT A tool for visualizing and editing XML transformation rules (based on XSLT)
SOM A P2P OWL ontology visual authoring tool	SALI Viewer Structure Activity Landscape Index	FST Visualizer A state-machine visualizer	CLF/Panoramix A monitoring tool for distributed applications based on the CLF middleware platform

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