Nodelist

As the whole project is designed to be applicable to many different maps, the end-user software can have no knowledge of the map compiled into it. Instead, it loads a configuration file (specified as a parameter to the applet) from the web-server^3.3 when it is first started. The format of this file is detailed in Appendix D. It includes the filename of the map image, which is also downloaded from the web-server, and crucially details the names and positions of the nodes. Additionally it holds the network line definitions, but these are not used in this piece of software.

The nodelist class holds a list of these nodes. The node class holds an ID number, name, position and sorting key for each node. The nodelist class uses these to provide methods for finding nodes according to their position on the map, and most similar requests. It can also provide an alphabetical sort of its list, and a helper class will download the configuration file from the web and build the nodelist object. Therefore, any other end-user programs can use these classes to link their interfaces to the map.