| Summary: | With the widespread use of mobile devices, location-awareness in software applications has become an increasingly important concept. One important aspect of location-aware applications is the ability to provide map and navigation support for the user. Basically, providing maps and navigational information to the user complements and empowers the notion of location-awareness. Although map and navigation support are widely used in mobile applications, there are circumstances, where they are also useful for desktop applications. There are applications which run without any connection to the Internet and/or demand high computing power, where a smart phone is not sufficient. There are many frameworks for providing map and navigation support in the mobile and web domain. For the desktop domain, map and navigation support is limited. There are no frameworks which provide map and navigation support in an integrated manner. In this paper, an easy to use open source navigation framework for the Java programming language is presented. By using this specific navigation framework, software developers will be able to add map, navigation and path finding support to their applications. In order to minimize network costs for downloading map images over the Internet, a caching strategy is employed. The software developers will be able to integrate navigation support and maps easily to their applications. Finally, demonstration applications implemented using our framework are described to demonstrate the capabilities of our framework.
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