Developer Resources

Architecture

Overview
Central Data Strucure: Document Tree
Functionality: Behaviors
Hubs, which list behaviors and associated data
Communication mechanisms
- Low-level Protocols: Restore, Build, Format, Paint, Events, Save, Destroy
- High-level Semantic Events
- Ad Hoc

API

The Javadoc API can be downloaded and is online.

The source code takes advantage of Java generics. Generics allow one to typecheck container classes among other things, but compile to classes that can run on Java 1.4 JVMs. If you see a class with a part in angle brackets, as in CHashMap<V>, you can safely ignore that part.

Tutorials

"How to Write a Behavior" bridges the architecture and API. Although behaviors are mainly idiosyncratic specializations of the basic protocols and therefore not heavily commented, it includes a few example behaviors.
"How to Write a Media Adaptor" extends the above with specifics for media adaptors.

Source Code Examples

multivalent.demo.MyBehavior -- template for usual things you want to do (I copy and paste from this myself)
tool.doc.ExtractText -- how to iterate over pages
tool.doc.ExtractText and tool.pdf.Info and other tools -- use of media adaptors outside of browser
multivalent.demo.Embed -- embedding viewers into embedded into Java Swing-based applications
As well, at this time many patterns of implementation are given by example in source code so examining other classes can be invaluable.

How to Compile

In the first place, the system is designed to be extended without modification of the core: you should be able to use the prebuilt Multivalent.jar as is. Moreover, Java byte codes are cross-platform, so there is no need to compile for different operating systems.

In you do compile for other reasons, be sure to compile with Java 1.5's javac with the -source 1.5 option, and to copy over the supporting files (non-compiled .class, images, sounds, hubs, and so on) files from the browser JAR. Some classes refer to other packages like Lucene or the TAP font library, so it is probably easiest to unpack the JAR and use the existing .class and other files, and just compile classes that are changed.

Ed Randall posted an Ant build file on the Help forum in the "how to compile multivalent" thread that compiles under Java 1.4 with the generics compiler, and for those using Java 1.5 Greg Novak posted a simplified version.