CS 280: Graduate Individual Studies Proposal

Web-Based Replacement for PowerPoint

(With Collaborative note-taking capability)

Advisor: Dr. Chris Pollett

Description

The main aim of this application is to provide a web-based replacement for Power-Point slides. This tool is to be built over the features provided by the open source project Slidy [1] supported by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). For implementing the features provided by the power-point creator we plan to use another open source tool called the FCKeditor [2] which is freely distributed under the GPL, LGPL and MPL open source licenses. The plan is to introduce a shape editor feature in the FCKeditors [2] toolbar and use some of its existing features in the power-point creator. The first task is to create a shape editor that creates various shapes and outputs to svg or canvas tag. The main challenge here is to create the shape and provide the ability to resize the shape and to move the created shape around the editor. Once this is done then the next target would be embedding the FCKeditor as a whole or just its toolbar in Slidy. As FCKeditor and Slidy were developed by different groups and it would be a great challenge to bring them together as a single entity. Another major challenge after the integration is to modify all the FCKeditor functionality such that its output XHTML is compatible with Slidy. Once all the above said tasks are complete the next challenging aspect of the project is to bring the user interface closer to that of existing PowerPoint software and implementing features like adding new slides, thumbnail views, and view slideshows. Once the PowerPoint creator is constructed, the plan is to extend this application and build a collaborative note taking feature over it. With the help of this feature, students would be able to view the professors slides and then look into the slide as well as take notes on the slides and save them for future use. This would be implemented using AJAX to update the server .This note taking feature is to be implemented without using a database. Implementation of this feature is like implementing a miniature of a Wiki without using a database, this way of implementation will have good programming challenges since we try to do database like transactions using a flat file system. Another proposed feature of this application is to provide an ability to support stand-alone version of the slides created.