In hopes of spreading some holiday cheer, I’m happy to announce that the source code for my Flex TreeMap component is now available for download on Google Code. You’ll need to access the code using a Subversion client. I recommend TortoiseSVN, but many others exist.

The code is available under the terms of the GPL, version 2 (Author’s Note: It is now MIT licensed for extra usefulness!) This means that you can use my component for free, but you must release your full source code using the same license. This is a great opportunity for other open source projects looking for advanced visualization solutions.

If you’re unfamiliar with my previous work on this component, have a look at a sample that demonstrates selection:

Once you’ve got the source code downloaded, and you’re ready to get started, be sure to look at the sample applications in the “examples” directory first. They give you a few tips and tricks for using some of the more advanced functionality the component provides. Additionally, you may access the online documentation generated by ASDoc.

To build the TreeMap SWC, you can run the Ant script “build.xml”. You may need to update the build.properties file with the location where you installed the Flex 2 SDK (it’s free to download and use if you don’t have it already). Once I’m happy with the feature set of the component, and I’ve had more time to search for bugs, I plan to make zipped released with the SWC prebuilt for you. Right now, the code is considered beta quality! I have fixed some bugs recently, and I expect to encounter more. If you happen to find a bug, I encourage you to submit it to the issue tracker, and I’ll take a look.

That’s it for now. Stay tuned for future updates. I plan to write several more examples to include in the repository to get folks started. If you find yourself having trouble using a certain feature, please let me know. Either place suggestions in the comment section below. Once again, happy holidays!