Huffman Coding Visualization: Project Proposal

There is an implementation with most of what we want in the Swan distribution.

Must be able to read an input text to be coded (perhaps from a file), generate frequency tables, generate individual tree nodes, step through generating the tree, and show the final output tree. Then, the user should be able to encode and decode strings.

The visualization ought to have well-defined phases, such like:

• Type in source text for generating tree, or point to a text file (click NEXT)
• Generate frequency tables (click NEXT)
• Generate initial list of trees (single leaf nodes) (click NEXT)
• Step through tree generation (clicking NEXT each time)
• Show final output tree
• Allow user to type in text to be coded, and step through the coding process
• Allow user to type in code to be decoded, and step through the decoding process

This way, the user doesn't get lost -- all he does is answer the applet's questions and click NEXT each time. Irrelevant UI elements can disappear after they are no longer needed.

Nice additional feature: ability to ask the student which nodes should be added together next. List of subtrees should still keep itself sorted automatically.

Last updated: August 11, 2010