Welcome to the DNA Construction Kit project pages!
This project continues the work of my already completed diploma thesis
released in September 2004 at the University
of Applied Sciences, Augsburg, Germany. The title of this work
was "Development of an all-round screenpainter framework based
on Java and XML". It included a fully functional prototype that
was already published under a BSD-style License. In this project the
application will be rewritten from scratch to bring it more in line
with the conceptual idea and improve weak points of the first version.
The software is a screenpainter tool like Flash
or Director
that allows the user to create a multimedia project draft. After design
time export-plugins translate this abstract draft into nearly any
file format, which is possible because the draft consists of a gerneralized
abstract system.
Thus this screenpainter combines the basic properties and functions
that are equal for all screenpainters and makes it possible to create
abstract commonly valid projects. Only the export plugin has to know
specific technology details of the target file format it produces
which could be theoretically any known multimedia format like Flash,
PDF, C++, Java, VB, ...
Because of this big operative range the application is highly extensible
through plugins and modules!
The application has two main purposes:
- Provide an universal screenpainter that creates any format out
of one draft (as described above).
- Make a redistributable screenpainter available to compiler/interpreter/engine/player/runtime/...
authors that want to provide visual editors for their interpreting
multimedia software quickly. (They only have to write a little plugin
that cares about the translation of the abstract draft into their
specific source format)
The application is written in Java
which may lead to platform independence. However it will be developed
primary on/for Windows. Additional data will be handled through XML
documents.
Downloads
New: You can download a code snapshot of the new version's
current project state . This release contains the code of the DNA2
framework as is at 2005-05-15. Note that this is an incomplete working
draft of the code. The download contains the framework core, three
plugins and some code for GeneLab2. These folders can directly be
importet into Eclipse 3. Download it here.
The prototype is now available for download.
Note that this prototype is only available with German languaged documentation
and is developed no longer, but it's the basis for a new implementation
of the model as mentioned above.