[Pipet Devel] Re: Overflow/Loci/GMS collaboration

[J.W. Bizzaro]

jarl van katwijk wrote:
> 
> Gms does not 'wrap' external applications, it rather attaches them. Writting a
> wrapper-plugins is perfectly possible though.

I stand corrected.

> > An idea that we had for Loci, was that unconnected lines
> > on a workspace would represent data that would flow to and from the outside.
> > And since Loci was going to nest workspace in a workspace in a workspace,
> > etc., and each nested workspace is itself a node, unconnected lines would mean
> > data flows to a parent.  I'd like to see us do that in our collaboration.
> 
> Unconnected lines? Like 'deadend dataflows'?

What Loci would do in such a case is try to send the data to a parent node or
network, instead of just killing the dataflow.  We were going to define a
'dead-end' node for when the dataflow needs to be stopped.  Actually the
reverse is just as valid: unconnected lines stop the dataflow and special
nodes can send data to parents.  I just chose the former approach because
unconnected lines in a nested workspace can be mapped directly onto
unconnected lines on the parent node, which I think is more intuitive.  You
can see this in the following screenshot:

    http://bioinformatics.org/loci/documentation/screenshots/latest.gif

The red (unconnected) dots in the nested workspace (lower left) are mapped
onto the parent node (labeled 'composite') and appear as green (connected)
dots.

> Likewise, gms has data in 5 types availieble to every node\object.
> (Raw\string\integer\
> percentage\boolean). Historic data is cached\stored on disk.

Are you using XML?  What do you think about using it?

> Maybe the person that coded the core of Loci is interested switching from python to
> C?

Are you saying you want the GUI in C, or that you want Brad to help with the
core?

It's amusing that all 3 projects independently decided to separate the GUI
from the core.  But if we are to keep the GUI separate, does it really matter
what language the GUI is written in, or is this a personal preference?

I know it seems awkward to have 3 languages.  But I guess we'll have to see to
what extent our projects will be merged.  If we're looking at a single
distribution, and Overflow and GMS agree on either C or C++, then we can
consider C or C++ for the GUI.  But if our projects become separate
distributions (as with Gnome) that communicate through CORBA, language
shouldn't matter.

Cheers.
Jeff
-- 
                      +----------------------------------+
                      |           J.W. Bizzaro           |
                      |                                  |
                      | http://bioinformatics.org/~jeff/ |
                      |                                  |
                      |        BIOINFORMATICS.ORG        |
                      |           The Open Lab           |
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                      |    http://bioinformatics.org/    |
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