Drawing API progress report

Almost a week passed. Time flies. I just recently recovered from the shock, when I went to the local Western Union office to fetch my payment, where for the first time in my life I had to spell 'Google' to the lady behind the glass, and here we are, already almost end of the first week...

Even my new keyboard arrived as well as the Pro Drupal book, so there is no obstacle (except for some silly exams) in my way to code for you.

I started to lay down the foundation for the oncoming drawing module, as well as submit an abstract to the upcoming FroSCon. The project page is to be found under http://drupal.org/project/drawing, there are no releases yet as there is hardly anything to release. The module is now capable of displaying a pre-defined shape on a test page (if you try out the module it can be found under yourdomain/shapes). You can check out via CVS, the project name is 'drawing'.

Drawing API = FAPI + Drawing

The original suggestion came from Simon Hobbs, one of my mentors, that we should create this new API in a similar fashion as the Forms API works. I have been studying the workflow of the FAPI, and this suggestion seems to be a very good idea. The aim is to provide an SVG toolkit ready to use, but also to make it possible to support other options for displaying the information (GD library). For the SVG part I will have support to PHP5 only, because of its excellend XML parsing features.

Basically what i am trying to achieve is that a developer will be able to define, alter shapes in a similar way as with FAPI. Of course with some simplification, as here there is no need of validation, and the range of supported elements is smaller. The reason why this description might be a bit unclear is that it is not entirelly clear to me either yet. I need to design a workflow, and examine FAPI more to understand how it works, and essentially replicate the required parts. If you want to follow the progress in more details, I will post more in-depth to the graphing & svg group here on groups.drupal. Any comment, or criticism is welcome.

Update: the outline can be found here.

There is one terrible shortcoming i am not sure i can overcome: i dont have a cool logo for the project ;)