| Re: GUI in IDL or PV-WAVE [message #68831 is a reply to message #68830] |
Wed, 25 November 2009 09:02   |
David Fanning
Messages: 11724
Registered: August 2001
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Senior Member |
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John writes:
> Thanks for the quick reply and you are quite correct, I'm not a
> programmer. I have some knowledge of programming from the "good old
> days" but no OO experience. However, I am an expert user of this type
> of software and I will be heavily involved in the design process. My
> programmer colleagues will actually do the spade work and I would like
> to find them a development environment that they are happy to use and
> that produces good results efficiently and quickly.
Yes, this is known in the trade as the "holy grail". :-)
I think you will find IDL somewhere near the top of the pack
when it comes to ease of use and producing results quickly. But,
of course, "results" is a relative term and your mileage may
vary depending upon the skill of the programmer and how well he
or she knows their tools. Producing large and complicated
application programs has never been "quick" or "easy" in my
personal experience, but then I'm still on the holy quest, too.
> One very important feature of the new software that myself and other
> expert users need is a way of customising the application whilst we
> are using it, e.g. via a macro or a scripting language and this has
> helped to prompt our interest in both PV-WAVE and IDL.
It is not clear to me what this means, exactly, but it sounds
ominous. If I were bidding on a job like this, this is the paragraph
that I would underline in red and put three stars in the margin.
I'm not saying it is impossible. I'm just saying I would need to
know a LOT more about what you have in mind.
> Our GUI would need to be quite complicated though, particularly when
> analysing the data. We like to graphically interact with the data and
> would need rubber band rectangles and lasso tools to select data and
> then various other tools to carry out operations on the data. As all
> of our data is time based, we also like to use "data brushing". This
> is where we might have three or four X-Y plots open for viewing with
> one of them in focus for editing. If we highlight data on the main X-Y
> plot between certain times, we would like to see a similar highlight
> automatically appear on the background plots between the same times.
> If this sort of thing can be done relatively easily and can be made to
> look ?sexy? in Windows, then IDL might be the way to go for us.
"Sexy" is easy enough, I guess. (Coyote could help out.) And
communicating between plots or windows is not particularly
difficult. I've done that any number of times in building
applications like this. It will help, tremendously, if you
write your IDL application using objects, however. Otherwise,
you will quickly become nearly overwhelmed keeping track of
things. It will help a lot if you keep program intelligence
de-centralized.
Since I've written these kinds of programs over and over,
I have developed an object library, named Catalyst, to help
me build these kinds of applications. (We actually thought
we had found the holy grail with this library, until we realized
we would have to draw a map (i.e., write documentation) if we
wanted others to find it, too. That discouraged us.)
In our hands, the Catalyst Library does allow us to write
applications "quickly and efficiently". Or, at least in about
half the time it used to take us, since so much of the infrastructure
of the program is built in. For example, object to object
communication. One object simply registers an interest in another
object's actions. When that action is performed, the interested
object is notified. This would make it, for example, trivial
to implement the highlighting action you wish to see in your
program. The library is available for free and is well documented
internally. What is missing is a User's Guide that might provide
a broad overall perspective.
But I think people have been able to look at the example programs
that come with the library and pretty quickly figure out how to
make it work. It helps, obviously, to know both IDL and object
programming. Anyway, it might be something to look at while you
are doing your evaluation.
http://www.dfanning.com/tips.html#Catalyst
Cheers,
David
--
David Fanning, Ph.D.
Fanning Software Consulting, Inc.
Coyote's Guide to IDL Programming: http://www.dfanning.com/
Sepore ma de ni thui. ("Perhaps thou speakest truth.")
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