From: Smith, F. <F....@te...> - 2005-10-21 19:43:26
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Greetings all .... It's a bit quiet on the list today! =20 Has anyone given any thought to adding or embedding plotting capabilities within PythonCard? A couple of years ago there was some thought of adding a component based on wxPyPlot. Unfortunately, and please someone correct me if I'm wrong, wxPyPlot doesn't support x-axis time and date ticks which is one of specific capabilities I'm looking for. I'm more interested in SciPy/Matplotlib integration - I believe that such a marriage would result in a very powerful development tool. The archive has the following from Kevin (based on an exchange of ideas with the SciPy development team) from way back in 2001 but it doesn't appear to have generated much interest or discussion. Perhaps members feel that adding capabilities goes beyond the scope and spirit of PythonCard. Frank -------------------------- I discovered SciPy http://www.scipy.org/ two days ago. Originally, I was interested in graphic format conversions, such as numerical arrays (NumPy) that we might need to support in PythonCard similar to the support I added for PIL. I still need more feedback on what should be put in the PythonCard framework for PIL and NumPy. Meanwhile, I"ve been in contact with Eric Jones of the SciPy team and have installed SciPy and run through the tutorials at: http://www.scipy.org/site_content/tutorials/plot_tutorial Since the plt module of SciPy is based on wxPython you can drive plt from the PythonCard shell (PyCrust) without needing the line: >>> import gui_thread gnuplot also seems to work fine, but I didn"t use it for very long so there may be some window manager conflicts between gnuplot and wxPython. As a simple exercise I modified minimal.py to simplify data input, a screen shot is attached. This will probably be expanded and become another sample for PythonCard; the sample will require SciPy which includes/requires NumPy. The short story is that PythonCard and SciPy seem like a good match. The question becomes what level of integration and overlap should we have between the two projects. I don"t know much about the requirements for "scientific computing" so right now I"m at the stage of asking newbie questions about what scientific users need in a GUI framework and environment. I thought Eric"s response below was worth forwarding to the list in case other people have suggestions on how PythonCard can be a useful tool in science. If you"re on the PythonCard list are interested in this topic, please speak up. Ka -----Original Message-----=20 From: eric jones [mailto:eric@en...] Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2001 10:53 AM=20 To: Kevin Altis=20 Subject: Re: some other questions on scipy=20 I noticed SciGraphica today on the SF Python list. http://sourceforge.net/projects/scigraphica/ It only works on Linux, but I guess this is a "competitor" of sorts? Not really a competitor -- SciPy has a huge amount of Numerical calculation stuff that is orthogonal to SciGraphica"s effort. They are really about making it easy to build pretty plots. I"m very in that project as they look to have taken the graphics a very long way. Further, they are planning on breaking things out to make them accesible from Python command line in the next version which means they can be used right along with SciPy. The big problem with SciGraphica is its based on GTK. GTK looks bad on Windows, isn"t easy to install, and isn"t stable. Windows is a major platform and SciPy has to support it as well as, or even better than Linux, to be viable. After all, Linux people are used to fiddling with things to get them to work. Windows people aren"t. That means GTK isn"t a viable option in my view. On the other hand, I have wondered how hard it is to switch this general framework over to wxPython or even try to set it up so it is backend independent. I have been talking with the guys at the Space Telescope Institute (they run Hubble), and they are also very interested in graphics stuff. We have pitched around this idea quite a bit in the last few weeks, but haven"t formalized a set of specs or a game plan yet with regards to this. We are also looking hard at using VTK (www.kitware.com) for all 3D stuff. There are benefits and drawbacks to this that are still under consideration. > What are other comparable packages, anything driven by Python or that Python > interfaces to? I"m just trying to understand the bounds of the problem that > needs to be addressed. I don"t think SciPy really has a competitor. The Scientific Python project by Konrad Hinsen is similar, but is slightly more focused on computational chemistry. The most similar package to SciPy would be Matlab (or Octave in the Open Source version). National Instruments has a less used one called HiQ. There is also IDL, Mathematica, Maple, etc. which serve a similar purpose. The general goal of SciPy is to make python a viable alternative to these tools and then leverage the power of Python to take it beyond them. If you have access to Matlab, you might try it out. Octave is less useful, but still a reasonable thing to look at. I"ve also heard of a language called R that is OS that might serve similar purposes. So SciPy proper I guess focuses on two things: scientific libraries and visualizing data. We want to make it easy to do scientific stuff in Python as well as make sure that the tools or algorithms/scripts developed with SciPy can be dropped into larger apps with minimal fuss. Things like turtle might actually have a place in the visualization section. The GUI building end, at least right now, is stuff we"d like to borrow from you guys that know what is going on in that arena of Python. Later, we might have a full blown GUI with all this stuff available together though. I"m very glad your playing with SciPy because combining SciPy with PythonCard is *exactly* what is so powerful about building it in Python -- and I"m counting on you et al. to think of things we never had. :)=20 |