Re: [Opencfd-develop] scripting vs library

[Anton K. <an...@ku...>]

Hi Jinming,

It is really good to find some parser and all these stuff somewhere. 
Well, all script languages you are talking about are general script 
languages and they are fine. However, we still need to add some specific 
commands to it, do not we? Then, we have to write parsers and so on... 
Oh! I see you did it already :)

Probably, this is excellent. And your point of view is correct (your 
script is very nice, so I appreciated). But what do you think about 
library + frontend? So, the library (or kernel) and special 
graphical/sciptable system above it. Well, probably I have to wait for 
any developers docs  before any ideas :)) Sorry, guys. Maybe it looks 
like this already. :)

---

Thank you for CGNS. I am studying it now.

Anton

Jinming Xu wrote:

>> From: Anton Kulchitsky <an...@ku...>
>> To: Jinming Xu <jin...@ms...>
>> Subject: mail list etc.
>> Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2004 13:15:39 -0800
>>
>> Jinming,
>>
>>> (1) Regarding the GUI, you can discuss with dano, one of the 
>>> developers of OpenCFD. You two can take charge of it. I have no 
>>> strong opinion of any particular GUI. What I said may not be correct 
>>> and I don't stick with it. Let the hands-on developers decide.
>>
>>
>> Do you have a mail list? Probably, we could discuss it together.
>>
>>>
>>> (2) Regarding the stand-alone and library, you are only partially 
>>> right. The stand-alone you are talking about is not programmable. 
>>> The new version of OpenCFD will be programmable, or say scriptable. 
>>> So it's not merely a stand-alone, it's also a server, or a library. 
>>> You can use simple commands (macro) to control it. All the 
>>> commercial CFD software is like this.
>>
>>
>> I mostly agree. However, it is hard to develop a good script (or find 
>> a good one, that is IMHO better). Even more however ;), we are very 
>> different from commercial software. They chose this way (of 
>> stand-alone monsters with OS like behaviour) mostly because they are 
>> "close-source" and it is much more convenient for them to give some 
>> kind of enviroment for users. For an open-source projects it is very 
>> big advantage if the project is a library (open!) plus some gui 
>> scriptable interface above the library, some kind of front-end. Thus, 
>> we leave a choice for users what to use.
>
>
> Why do you think there is no good script to choose? From Tcl, Python 
> to Scheme, these scripting languages are widely used in commercial as 
> well as open-source codes. I once saw some open-source CFD codes use 
> scripting languages too.
>
> The big advantage of scripting is the easy of use, both in terms of 
> the labor involved and the skills required. In the sense of skills 
> involved, library approach will be very hard for users who are not 
> developers. Without scripting, you have to compile each time for each 
> job, but with script, all this can be done in a single script without 
> compilation.
>
> Here is a sample script for OpenCFD 0.3 to generate a grid:
> # --------------- Tutorial Script ------------------------
> # A very preliminary script for OpenCFD to generate a grid
> # For more info, please refer to the doc or visit http://opencfd.sf.net
> # All Rights Reserved!  Jinming Xu jx...@op...
> import geom
> geom.get("rub.dxf")
> geom.shrink([6.0])
> import grid
> grid.cart(30,25)
> grid.addExtrLayer(3,0.8)
> grid.save("2d-bas.cgns")
> #--------------------end---------------------------------------------
>
>> That is why I am talking about free library rather than an 
>> application like Matlab or Mathematica. I think Octave is not 
>> succeeded very much because they tried to be similar to Matlab. But 
>> GSL (GNU scientific library) succeeded much better due to they are 
>> different but still cover same tasks.
>>
>>
>> I do not mean that my opinion is better. It is my point of view as a 
>> user of a library and model developer. I think this is a kind of 
>> "UNIX-way": we have components (libraries) and we have fron-ends and 
>> UI if users need them. This is something different from commercial 
>> way, but it looks more attractive for me. Finally, this software is 
>> for advanced users or even for programmers (script or FORTRAN 
>> programmers at least), so the library could be very attractive for 
>> them still.
>>
>>>
>>> (3) Yes Latex files are much better than .docs. We can made this 
>>> change. Actually all the doc included in the tar ball is in latex.
>>
>>
>> Sounds just fine.
>>
>> Anton
>
>
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