[Biojava-dev] GUI object manipulation

[Russ Kepler]

All,

I'm a recent user of the BioJava code, this in support of a project doing some 
specialized trace viewing/editing and sequence assembly.  I'm hoping to use 
the BioJava library in support for much of this and am still acquiring an 
understanding of the classes and their interfaces.

Since the project is going to have a lot of GUI I thought that I'd start by 
digging into the GUI code in org.biojava.bio.gui  

One thing I'm going to need is the ability to display a cursor on trace and 
sequence data.  This is fairly easily handled on an individual object basis 
but it's not uncommon to have a set of objects who all want to display the 
same cursor position (consider a trace with the symbols and a ruler 
underneath) so it seems that the MultiLineRenderer is a natural place for the 
collective code to go.

Before I dive in and muck things up does anyone have any suggestions?  This 
area of the code is somewhat difficult and fairly unburdened with comments 
(plus I'd hate to introduce myself by screwing something up).

In the spirit of introducing myself: I'm a long time software developer (long 
time meaning I remember punching paper tape and cards) with quite a bit of 
experience in Java, having started using Java about 1.1.  I've lived mostly 
in the 'fat client' side of Java, starting with AWT and happily moving to 
Swing when it became available.  I've done bioinformatics for a little longer 
than Java, but a lot of the work was more in the vein of pushing bytes in 
databases and doing sample management (think LIMS)  than cool algorithm work.   

-- 
Russ Kepler
8600 La Sala del Centro
Albuquerque NM  87111

office: 505 296 4783
cell: 505 301 4796