From maintainers-request at octave dot org Thu Feb  9 12:38:40 2006
Subject: Re: octave gui & mingw
From: Shai Ayal <shaiay at gmail dot com>
To: Sebastien Loisel <sloisel at gmail dot com>
Cc: John Swensen <jswensen at intergate dot com>, maintainers@octave.org
Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2006 20:36:59 +0200

Wow, talk about ambitious goals!

Good luck
Shai

On 2/9/06, Sebastien Loisel <sloisel at gmail dot com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> First off, let me say that the more octave GUI/IDE projects I know about,
> the better, so thanks for all the input so far. I would definetly appreciate
> being able to see any other code available.
>
> Second, to introduce myself a bit more usefully, I'm a postdoc at the
> University of Geneva in math (scientific computing and pure analysis). I'm
> also a good programmer.
>
> From the replies, I'd like to give a few more details about my goals, and
> specifically answer John and Ole.
>
> I want:
> * To edit code in this GUI/IDE.
> * To interact with the octave prompt in this GUI/IDE.
> * To view plot, zoom, change axes, do animations (viz.
> set(gcf,'DoubleBuffer','on')) and so on.
> * To export my plots to EPS for inclusion in my papers.
> * To plot 2d and 3d.
> * To have rich figure handling like subplot, axes and more generally the set
> command.
>
> One of my applications includes viewing an icosahedral grid of the sphere in
> 3d with the solution of a PDE color-coded on it. I need to spin the sphere
> in real time.
>
> On 2/9/06, John Swensen <jswensen at intergate dot com> wrote:
> > experienced, my problems may have been due to that.  I tried using the
> > QProcess class and redirecting STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR to talk with an
> > instance of Octave.  The problem lied in the fact that I couldn't get it
> >
>
> > think the first step would be to design a good interface control
> > document (ICD) that defines the data that is passed between the octave
>
>  Ole Jacob Hagen <waterthrill at yahoo dot no> wrote:
>
> I am planning to make oplot (http://oplot.sf.net) compatible with Qt4,
> so Oplot supports Windows natively  without any cost for both end user
> and developer. :-)
>
> My intention is simple. QT4 has a text editor, look here for an amazingly
> short syntax highlighter:
> http://doc.trolltech.com/4.1/richtext-syntaxhighlighter.html.
> Furthermore, you can use OpenGL easily:
> http://doc.trolltech.com/4.1/opengl-hellogl.html. Given an
> OpenGL plotting program, you can easily create PS, EPS and PDF files:
> http://www.geuz.org/gl2ps/. Such a GUI/IDE would be portable anywhere octave
> and QT4 currently compile. I also like QT4 because, by my standards, it
> makes very concise C++ GUI code.
>
> I would like to stick all these things and octave into a binary, so that
> when I plot stuff in octave, I can zoom or spin it and do whatever, just
> like in Matlab, and include a reasonable text editor. I really don't think
> it would be that much code, with all the tools I enumerated above.
>
> Maybe communicating with octave via pipes is a great idea, but as John
> points out you end up having to design a communication protocol. Also, most
> attempts want to reuse gnuplot, which is a great idea, but I don't have the
> expertise to go and add to gnuplot the features I want to copy from Matlab.
> It's a lot easier for me to implement this stuff from scratch. On the other
> hand, if oplot is a QT4 widget that does what I need, then that's one less
> thing I have to do.
>
> Those of you that have struggled with the threading, I am shooting initially
> for something much like Matlab. The GUI dies during long computations. That
> can be fixed later, maybe when octave becomes threadsafe or maybe before by
> adding a giant lock.
>
> My idea for the plotter is that I would make available in octave three new
> functions: a function that draws a Gouraud shaded triangle soup (like
> Matlab's patch), Gouraud shaded lines and a function to place text. Okay,
> maybe one for setting a clip rectangle and changing the transformation
> matrix. Then I would implement all the higher level functionality as .m
> files on top of that. Matlab also has widgets and stuff but that can wait.
> QT can have widgets and OpenGL in the same window anyway.
>
> Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I should add that if anyone wants to
> channel their enthusiasm towards one of the custom QT4 widgets I need (the
> .m file editor, the GL plotter or even the simpler widgets like the prompt,
> the lower-left working directory pane, a help widget, etc...) then I would
> definetly want to take advantage of such an effort.
>
> Ok, now I have to go to the grocery store.
>
> Sébastien Loisel
>
>