Marking up arbitrary Web pages in Classroom 2000

Sponsor	Gregory Abowd abowd@cc.gatech.edu 380 CRB and 240 CCB
Area	HCI, Software Engineering and Future Computing Environments

Problem
The electronic whiteboard in Classroom 2000, ZenPad, allows for writing on a blank screen or a prepared, but static background image that comes from a program such as Powerpoint. That is nice, but it would be much nicer if we were able to mark up other materials. For instance, if we could pull in an arbitrary Web page and then write over it and have those annotations preserved for later review many more people would be interested.

The inherent difficulty of this problem is one of registration. Marks made over a Web page on one machine will be very difficult to redraw on another machine with different display characteristics. You have to have more control over the rendered HTML in order to be able to redisplay arbitrary penstrokes over a page. What you want is a Java-based HTML renderer that you can then program to work with ZenPad.

Well, such a beast now exist. JavaSoft is now providing a Java bean to do HTML rendering. The objective of this project is to obtain this Java bean from the JavaSoft Web site and extend it to work within ZenPad, or at least to demonstrate the capability of being able to mark up an arbitrary Web page with penstrokes. Background

Go to Java Web site and download the HTML Java Bean.
You will want to know about Java Beans and there are plenty of sources to find out about that, either in books or on the Web.
You will want to contact Jason Brotherton to get information on ZenPad and how it might be extended to use this new HTML Java Bean.

Deliverables

You will need to demonstrate the working HTML Java Bean.
You will need to show how you can modify the behavior of this bean to accept and record penstrokes. Please provide source.
You will need to explain how this solution can work inside of ZenPad. This explanation should be in the form of a Web page.

Evaluation
If you are able to complete all of the deliverables, you will do fine. If you are unable to complete all three, then don't worry as we will be most interested to find out what you learned in the process.