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[ Introduction | Documentation | Release 1.0 | Design Document | Team JavaLicious ]

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(lom-baugh-daugh)

Animator Introduction

Graphics animators are often used as educational aids in introductory computer science classes. In particular, XTango and Samba are two graphics animators for use in the X11 Window System. XTango and Samba are both written in C, and Samba uses POLKA, a graphics animator toolkit written in C++. Input to XTango and Samba is given as lines of text that are parsed and instructed as necessary to create animations.

However, although both animators are powerful educational tools, they can only be used on the X11 Window System. Therefore, one focus of our summer work will developing a graphics animation tool similar to XTango and Samba, but will have the capability to be used on multiple platforms. Keeping in tradition with XTango, Samba, and Polka the proposed name of our graphics tool is "Lambada" (The Forbidden Animator). In order to create a cross-platform software product, Lambada will be written in both Java and Python. Java compilers have been written for most computer environments with the exception of Windows 3.x, but Python is compatible with Windows 3.x. Furthermore, our goal is to accomodate communication between a C++ program and Lambada in the form of sockets as well as piping, as Macintosh environments do not support piping capabilities.

Lambada was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation
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Release 1.0

Lambada is available right here, including source code and
documentation in tar.gz format.

Sambadoc.txt contains a list of all the working animator commands. Lambada was partially reverse engineered with full support of these commands in mind.

Please refer to the extensive documentation regarding installation as well as a host of other useful information.

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Lambada Design Document

List of Proposed Animator Features

The following list describes the features that are implemented in Lambada. This list extends some of the features of Samba, as well as adding a few features that are not available in Samba.

Objects / Commands

Object Manipulations

Team JavaLicious

Includes:
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