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

[J.W. Bizzaro]

  From: Richard Wherry 
  Looks very interesting. It could be used as a framework for the Gestalt components which could be individual data manipulation programs (for example).

  As you and Brad have suggested, I think it's a strong possibility.

  I'd be interested in hearing the opinion of someone who has a more concrete idea of the goals of Gestalt System than myself. 

  I look forward to hearing from Tim and Karsten about how useful Piper might be in achieving the goals of Gestalt.  (I appreciate your reply too, Richard :-))

  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?

  Brad replied to this part of your message, but I'll add that you may want to take a closer look at Overflow, one of the collaborating projects:

  http://freespeech.sourceforge.net/FreeSpeech/html/Overflow/home.html

  Overflow is a very fast, low-level, ``data flow'' system that operates on a local host.  It can be said that the goal of Piper is to distribute instances of Overflow around the Internet.

  Overflow forms the basis of Piper.  All Piper nodes are either Overflow nodes or they are programs that are wrapped by Overflow.  It may be that it can be extended to manipulate data the way the Gestalt wants to, if it can not already.
   
  It brings to mind Clementine from SPSS - at least in the "Work Flow Diagram" sense.

  You're very observant.  Clementine was actually the inspiration for Piper's WFD (formerly part of The Loci Project and now part of the Pied/Piper UI).  You may also be interested in Cerebellum:

  http://www.cerebellumsoft.com/product/designer.html

  But, so far, the only person to take on the responsibility of database integration (doing mining, manipulation, etc.) with Piper is Brad, and he is already over-extended and over-worked.

  As I mentioned in my first message, Piper is a collaborative between 4 relatively independent projects: BlueBox, Loci, GMS, and Overflow.  All 4 projects are complementary, and we respect the code base of each (at least Brad keeps reminding me of that ;-) -- inside joke).  Our reason for collaborating is, as appears in the Gestalt Manifesto, that this project is too large for one or two developers to take on.  Perhaps, if it fits in with Gestalt's goals, Gestalt can be the 5th collaborator and take on the task of database access, as well as some aspects of data manipulation and transfer...?  Let me know what you think.

  Cheers.
  Jeff


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