GEOSHEET - A DISTRIBUTED VISUALIZATION TOOL FOR GEOMETRIC ALGORITHMS

GeoSheet (version 1.0) is an interactive visualization tool for visual izing geometric algorithms in distributed environments. It provides fe atures such as interactive visualization of program states for debuggi ng, high-level graphical input/output manipulation facilities for geom etric objects, reuse of existing data structures and algorithms implem entation, and more importantly distributed executions on heterogeneous machines at different sites. To minimize development effort of the to ol we make use of existing software packages available in public domai n. Specifically we extend Xfig with a message-driven interface and a s ocket-based interprocess communication (IPC) mechanism. This extended- Xfig is the backbone of this version of the tool. Object-oriented prog ramming methodology is used to construct the visualization interface. By deriving from traditional data type and algorithm libraries, our ab stract GeoObject representation super-classes are easy to use, easy to construct, and highly portable. Although GeoSheet is not restricted t o a particular application domain or any programming language, this re lease only contains geometric algorithm implementations in C++ and LED A. We hope that the geometric algorithm designers will find it useful when they develop their algorithms.