Program description and download

General description

Some people asked me how it works and what technologies were used:
  1. The visitor creates the Genealogy information file (gedcom file) in gedcom standard. It it a plain text file that can be viewed by a regular word processor.
  2. The upload page uses INPUT TYPE="file" HTML tag to upload data into the server, which is Apache running under the Linux (Debian).
  3. The administative interface is performed in PHP.
  4. The JavaServlet runs under Tomcat parse gedcom file and output XML file goes directly to the visitor's browser. You can see the data in XML data by View Source command.
  5. The XML transformed into the viewable format by XSLT, which also gets uploaded into a visitor's browser. Unlike an XML file with data, which is re-generated whenever you decide to change the "key" person, an XSLT file is static.
  6. In the legacy mode the XSLT transformation is done on the server using Apache Xalan/Xerces libraries.
  7. Sizes, colors, location of nodes, etc. are defined through CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
  8. Interactivity, i.e. openning - closing branches is handled on the client's side using JavaScript, which is sometimes called DHTML. After opening the page, you can explore the whole Family Map off-line.

Downloads and contributions

You do not have to download and install Family Map Viewer, because the service is freely avaliable at www.tyoma.com web site. If you see some disadvanatage or bugs in the program, it probably would be better if you report it to the author tyoma@tyoma.com to correct running version.

Author also is also greatlly apreshiate futher internationalization, adding more languages. If somebody is unhappy with the current skin, the contributions of the additional skins would be greatlly apreciated.

In case you willing to contribute new skin or language set, it is still not needed to download and install software. You can simply save the XML file and related XSL, CSS and js files on your computer and pertform development using XSLT engine of your browser. After you done, mail new XSL/CSS to me and I will drop it into the server.

Finally, if you are really would like to run your own Family Map Viewer on your domain, or made serious contribution to the Java code, here is the source:

Instalation notes

  1. Unzip familyMap.zip into the document root of your Apache server
  2. Deploy familyMap.jar into Tomcat server.
  3. Under application directory create the subdirectory named data and assign permisions 777 to it. The directory data should be on the same level as WEB-INF directory.
  4. Adjust path to the data directory within php elements, located at familyMap/php directory. On my system it is /usr/java/tomcat/webapps/ROOT/data. The element names are upload.php and delete.php
  5. Adjust URL to the servlet in view.php element. On my system it is /servlet/familyMap.
  6. On my server, html pages are considered to be a PHP templates. If you restrict PHP only to pages with .php extenshion, you will have to rename files in the familyMap/html directory, as a well as adjust links.