Investigating and Using HTML 5 Canvas Techniques in Engineering Flowchart

Most of flowchart tools are stand alone version which is difficult to share by users. At the same time, a small number of exiting online tools are neither browser compatible nor open source, and most of them are large and complex. In addition, the meta information of all existing nodes in these flowcharts are limited. In this paper, we introduce the basic concepts and techniques of flowchart, and a flowchart of a new online collaborative editing tool based on HTML 5 Canvas techniques is achieved. This tool is easy to share and collaborate as the data are stored at a cloud server, free to customize the meta information of task nodes and capable of binding file attachments. Furthermore, this tool provides a template function that allows users to "draw once, use many times". Finally, a real project using this tool is created and shows that the tool is flexible, interoperable and easy to use.