Re: [Opencfd-develop] scripting vs library

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

Thank you Jinming,

I will study and transform your text into LaTeX + Makefile to produce 
both pdf and ps.

What do you think about CVS repository?

Thanks again,

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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