RE: Re: [Plplot-general] (no subject)

[Lehmann, E. {TR-I~Penzberg} <eck...@Ro...>]

Andrew -

> The philosophy of plplot has always been to develop a
> standard API of plotting routines. Through the bindings we=20
> attempt to support as many different languages as possible,=20
> all with a similar interface. There is no way we could do=20

I like this philosophy. From Ali's mail I understood that he wants/needs
to use Java2D/3D for plotting rather than native code - because he was
writing about reimplementing Plplot for Java2D/3D, which means
reimplementing in pure Java. That doesn't make sense in my opinion,
Plplot is good as it is (at least its philosophy, more on this later)
and if one wants to use pure Java, she should take a look at existing
plotting devices in pure Java.

I use Plplot for displaying very large amounts of data in XY line plots,
up to 150,000 points. Therefore Plplot and for me the Tcl/Tk interface
is a good choice - simply because my application will run on "old"
hardware as well. Plotting these data with pure Java is definitely slow
on i386 platforms with only about 1 to 1.8 GHz frequencies. Besides that
Plplot is for simple plotting more suited and not as complex as e.g.
JFreeChart.

> Now there is probably no reason you couldn't implement a java
> plplot widget (similar things have been done for Gnome under Linux)=20
> if this was the kind of thing you were interested in.
> If you have any ideas about this then feel free to suggest them or=20
> provide code. Please remember though that we would like to=20
> keep some uniformity between bindings and that ease of=20
> maintenance is important.

That would be a good idea, I have some proposals and I can imagine to
provide code as well as soon as I got the time to do so. I was starting
with Plplotter for Tcl/Tk on windows - At this time it was for me the
only useful interface. But I would prefer Java in the end (not before
this week I heared that the Java interface is half way useful on Windows
too).=20
As soon as I have time left I could start to test and use the java
Plplot binding, maybe implement a Java plplot widget similar to the
plframe command in Tcl/Tk, and as well make contributions to the
project. For now I have some things in mind already that seem generally
important (not only for java) from my point of view:

- automatically axis and label scaling for zoomed plots. It should be
possible to have the scales of a plot automatically adjusted and visible
to the data in a zoomed plot window rather than have them zoomed
together with the entire plot. The same applies to data labels inside
the plot - currently they are resized to the same ratio the whole plot
is resized in a zoom operation and that looks 'uahhbrrrr'. I wrote a
mail to the list regarding this some time ago...
- more than 16 colors. I have heard that the plot window is 16bit (?).
It would be interresting to coose any color from the normal rgb palette
and have 32bit colors.


Eckhard ;)