NCL Composer
NCL Composer is a multiplataform and flexible authoring tool for creating interactive multimedia applications for Digital TV based on NCL (Nested Context Language). It provides a minimal core and different views (implemented as plug-ins) supporting textual and graphical abstractions.
Main features
- Advanced textual editing, such as code coloring, autocomplete, and error marking
- Validation of NCL documents
- WYSISWG definition of the application layout
- Structure viewing/edition of NCL documents
- Integration with different players (e.g. Ginga-NCL Reference Implementation)
- Multi-platform (Linux, Windows, and MacOS X are officially supported)
- Easily extended through plug-ins
Source code organization
NCL Composer source code is divided into three main parts:
- src/core: a minimal core that supports loading and communication between plug-ins.
- src/gui: the GUI engine, responsible for grouping the different plugins in the same user interface.
- src/plugins: the official plug-ins supported by NCL Composer.
Building
Requirements
The main requirement for building NCL Composer is:
- cmake >= 3.2
- Qt >= 5.4
Linux
In a Debian-based system (e.g. Debian, Ubuntu, or Linux Mint) you can easily install Qt libraries through:
$ apt-get install libqtbase5-dev libqttool5-dev
After installing the dependencies and cloning the NCL Composer's repository, you can compile NCL Composer by (in the nclcomposer's root directory):
$ mkdir _build && cd _build
$ cmake ..
$ make
If everything is alright with the compilation process you should be able to find the executable (and run):
$ ./_build/bin/nclcomposer
Nightly builds
Linux Debian/Ubuntu/Mint
To install a nightly build of this repository you can run:
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:telemidia/daily-builds
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install nclcomposer
WARNING: Nightly builds are automatically generated builds from the latest development code. By their nature these builds are likely to contain bugs. We value your help. Please, report problems or give us feedbacks if you find any problem.
Main authors and contributors
- Roberto Azevedo [email protected]
- Eduardo Araújo [email protected]
Previous contributors
- Marcelo Moreno [email protected]
- Bruno Lima [email protected]
License
NCL Composer is available through LGPLv3.
Further information
- NCL Composer Official Website (http://composer.telemidia.puc-rio.br)
Acknowledgments
NCL Composer would not be possible without other open source software we use. In special, we would like to acknowledge:
- Qt for multi-plataform, gui, etc.
- QScintilla and Scintilla for textual editing features.
- QToolMainWindow: for a beautiful and easy-to-use organization of the interface.
- Graphviz: for automatically layout of nodes in structural view.