[Pipet Devel] Fw: [GS-discuss] Piper

[Brad Chapman]

On the Piper list Jeff wrote:
> I hope this is the start of a discussion thread with the Gestalt 
developers.
> 
> Jean-Marc or anyone else, could you reply to Richard (and the 
gestalt list)
> with an answer to his question below?

Well, I can be the "anyone else" and take a stab at it :-)

Richard wrote, on the Gestalt list:
> Looks very interesting. It could be used as a framework for the
> Gestalt components which could be individual data manipulation 
programs
> (for example). 

I think that makes sense for integrating the ideas (although I don't 
completely understand the Gestalt system yet). Piper is meant to be a 
system for connecting together different "components" which actually 
do the functional work, so it is kind of a framework, as you suggest.

> If I had a dataset consisting of continuous variables and categorical
> variables sitting on a machine somewhere and wanted to compute 
averages for
> all continuous variables and frequencies for all categorical 
variables,
> how would this be accomplished?

All of the actual computational work in this type of example would be 
done by individual programs, and not by Piper itself. The purpose of 
Piper would be to contact the remote machine with the data (which is 
presumedly also running Piper) to obtain the dataset. The actual 
computation could then be done at the remote machine (if a program was 
available to do it), or at the local machine. Either way, the results 
would be displayed at the local machine (obviously, otherwise you 
would never get to see them :-). The idea behind Piper is to create a 
flexible way to interact with remote and local data and programs and 
connect them together to make something happen.
    Currently, coding is directed at integrating Loci, GMS and 
Overflow (this is/will become Piper) and just dealing with local 
integrating amongst "components." This is coming along well so far, 
and once this gets going, remote communication will be the next thing 
to come (since that is really what I'm interested in :-).
    Does this make any sense? If not, let me know and I can try to 
make more sense...

Brad