Javanti

Developer

Christian Kohls
Tobias Windbrake
Wedel University of Applied Sciences

Documentation

Software

The software is no longer provided for security reasons.

Javanti is an integrated development environment for interactive presentations and eLearning applications (CBT, courseware etc.)

Virtual slides and smart elements

In Javanti the author works with virtual slides to create content. On each slide one can put smart elements. Those components can be of various complexity, starting with simple text, there are also audio, video, simulation or experiment settings available. Each element has specific properties, e.g. color, size or position. All properties can be manipulated at edittime and animated at runtime. There are already many elements available for Javanti: text labels, formated text, buttons, input fields, images (rotateable, scaleable and transparency), animated gifs, powerfull freehand graphic features (vector-based), predefined shapes (arrows, cubes, signs), bézier curves, multiple-choice tests, fill-in-the-blank tests, drag & drop tests, assignment and arrangement tests.

Timeline

Slides are arranged in a timeline to enable both defining a course/presentation structure and to set keyframe animation. The horizontal arrangement defines the slide sequence and the view duration for each slide. You can use multiple slide layers to show more than one slide at a time. This allows you to combine slides for content, chapter information and background skins (like a master slide).

Scripting language

Elements take respect to user interaction. Actions can be defined for input events such as mouse clicks or movements. Using these actions an individual behaviour for each element can be defined. It is very simple to change or animate properties of other elements on a slide. A complete scripting language Tcl (Tool Command Language) is also available to program more sophisticated features. Tcl is extended with some powerfull multimedia commands not only to create stunning effects but to improve the visualization of dynamic processes.

Shared Property Groups

It is possible to use a set of properties by more than one element. That is a number of elements use the same properties. Whenever a property changes, this change will be applied to all elements that are using its property group. This is very usefull to share always the same color, position, size or image source for a set of elements. For example you can change the color for a group of menu buttons in one step. Or you can ensure that headline elements in different slides are always at the same position and of the same size, font and color.

Extensibility

Using an open plugin concept Javanti is very easy to extend. A simple interface makes it very easy to develop new components or to integrate existing Java applications into Javanti. There are also interfaces to develop new property groups, property types and manipulation tools. To install new components the user only has to copy files into the plugin directory.

File format

The file format of Javanti is based on XML (eXtensible Markup Language). Using transform languages such as XSLT it is very easy to translate a Javanti file into other XML-based formats and vice versa.

Platform Independence

Javanti is 100% pure Java. Thus, Javanti is running on all major platforms including Windows, Linux, MacOS X and all systems for which a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is available.