Sun Oct 16 13:13:05 WEST 2005 Malcolm.Wallace@cs.york.ac.uk
* add a basic webpage describing Blobs
{
addfile ./blobs.png
binary ./blobs.png
addfile ./index.html
hunk ./index.html 1
+<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
+<html>
+<head>
+<title>
+ Blobs diagram editor
+</title>
+</head>
+ [_$_]
+<body bgcolor='#ffffff'>
+
+<center>
+<h1>Blobs</h1>
+<h2>a diagram editor in Haskell</h2>
+<table><tr><td width=200 align=center>
+<a href="#what">What is Blobs?</a><br>
+<a href="#use">How do I use it?</a><br>
+</td><td width=200 align=center>
+<a href="#download">Downloads</a><br>
+<a href="#contribute">How can I contribute?</a><br>
+</td></tr></table>
+</center>
+<hr>
+
+<center><img src="blobs.png" alt="the Blobs editor"></center>
+
+<center><h3><a name="what">What is Blobs?</a></h3></center>
+<p>
+<b>Blobs</b> is a diagram editor for directed graphs. It is written in
+Haskell, using the platform-independent GUI toolkit wxHaskell. It is a
+community project at a fairly early stage of development - you are
+encouraged to get involved and improve it!
+
+<p>
+Blobs is a front-end for drawing and editing graph diagrams. You
+must add your own back-end engine if you want it to do some analysis or
+processing of the graph. There are various analysis engines that use
+Blobs as a front-end, e.g. Dazzle for bayesian analysis of networks,
+FPTC for safety analysis of systems designs, and so on, but these are
+not currently available as open source. We do supply a couple of very
+simple engines, just to demonstrate how to connect the engine up to Blobs.
+
+<p>
+What can Blobs do?
+<ul>
+ <li> Draw nodes with textual labels, and optional extra (polymorphic)
+ information labels.
+ <li> Connect nodes together with edges. An edge has optional extra
+ information labels.
+ <li> You can create palettes of different node shapes, and load a
+ palette into the editor. (Currently, palette creation is by
+ hand, not graphical.)
+ <li> Graphs are stored in an XML file format.
+ <li> If you have a backend engine, you can send the graph to it for
+ analysis, receiving a graph back for viewing as a result.
+</ul>
+
+
+<hr>
+<center><h3><a name="download">Downloads</a></h3></center>
+
+<p>
+Because Blobs does not do anything much useful on its own, there is no
+released version of Blobs. Individual projects which share Blobs as a
+component have their own separate releases.
+
+<p>
+To use Blobs in your own project, you must collect a copy of the
+<a href="http://darcs.net/"><b>darcs</b></a> repository.
+<pre>
+ darcs get http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/darcs/Blobs
+</pre>
+
+<p><b>Copyright:</b> © 2005 the authors and contributors.
+
+<p>
+Blobs was originally written by Arjan van IJzendoorn and Martijn
+Schraage of the Universiteit Utrecht. Other contributors include
+Malcolm Wallace. Full details are in the <a
+href="COPYRIGHT">COPYRIGHT</a> file.
+
+<p><b>License:</b> This software is distributed under
+the terms of the LGPL (see file <a href="LICENCE-LGPL">LICENCE-LGPL</a>
+for more details), there is a special exception clause detailed in
+file <a href="COPYRIGHT">COPYRIGHT</a>.
+
+<p>
+This software comes with no warranty. Use at your own risk.
+
+<hr>
+<center><h3><a name="use">How do I use it?</a></h3></center>
+<p>
+
+<p>
+<b>Building instructions</b>
+<p>
+To build Blobs, you need:
+<ul>
+<li> <a href="http://haskell.org/ghc/">ghc</a>-6.2.2
+<li> <a href="http://www.wxwidgets.org/">wxWidgets</a>
+<li> <a href="http://wxhaskell.sourceforge.net/">wxHaskell</a>-0.9.0
+<li> <a href="http://haskell.org/HaXml/">HaXml</a>-1.14
+</ul>
+
+<p>
+On Windows you may also need to install
+<a href="http://www.mingw.org/">mingw</a> in order to have the GNU make
+utility etc.
+
+<p>
+In the toplevel Blobs directory, there is a Makefile. You may need to
+edit it slightly, e.g. for a different version of ghc, or to
+enable/disable building a MacOS application bundle (symbol MAC=yes).
+
+<p>
+Just type 'make' and Blobs should build. If you change or add any
+imports in the code itself, you may need to 'make depend' to update the
+Makefile.
+
+
+<hr>
+<center><h3><a name="contrib">How can I contribute to Blobs?</a></h3></center>
+<p>
+
+<p>
+Step one: join the
+<a href="http://haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/blobs">Blobs mailing list</a>.
+
+<p>
+Step two: <tt>darcs send</tt> your patches to the list.
+
+<p>
+Discussion about features is encouraged before you implement them.
+Patches to create or improve documentation (including this webpage) are
+just as welcome as actual code.
+
+<hr>
+ [_$_]
+</body>
+</html>
}