There should very little that I need to specifically say here. I hope that the User's guide to Wunderkammer, Guide to importing dictionaries into Wunderkammer, the Wunderkammer javadoc, the wkimport javadoc, and the well-commented and incredibly readable code :) will be enough to make any Java programmer understand how the software works. Having said that, I've started this section in the documentation in anticipation of needing to discuss aspects of Wunderkammer and wkimport's design and code that are not clear from other sources.
The Wunderkammer source code and wkimport source code are available for download here. I developed this code in the NetBeans IDE and I have released it with all the NetBeans project files, although the same code could probably be quite easily imported into other IDEs, such as Eclipse. Note that since Wunderkammer is a Java ME application, it is necessary to have the Sun Java Wireless Toolkit installed (this comes bundled in some distributions of NetBeans). It is also necessary to have the LWUIT library from Sun.
The Java Wireless Toolkit is not available for the Mac, sadly. However, Sun does make some excellent free virtualisation software: VirtualBox. I developed Wunderkammer under Ubuntu Linux running as a guest operating system through VirtualBox on a MacBook Pro.
Planned improvements
- wkimport
- Improving the script that controls the conversion and bundling process. It doesn't even stop when it encounters an error at the moment.
- Writing a more user-friendly interface for wkimport. I designed wkimport in such a way that it should be easy to plug any user interface into it.
- Writing more import routines to handle a wider variety of input dictionaries.
- Writing code to allow nested indexes of an arbitrary depth to be produced from structured data in fields. This might be handy in semantic domain fields, for example, where the source dictionary might have nested semantic domains that go to different depths of nesting.
- Tightening up the algorithms used for generating indexes.
Version 1.3 of Programmer's guide to Wunderkammer and wkimport, James McElvenny (first name followed by the at sign and then pfed dot info), 4 June 2009