[Repast-developer] custom charts question + properties

[Nick C. <nic...@ve...>]

Hi,

I've added support of the dynamic compilation of sequences and histogram
items for the various kinds of charts in repast. I've also fiddled with
the internals a bit so they should be a bit faster and look a bit
better. 

All this should make it fairly easy to create a chart building GUI so
the user can add charts on the fly. Data is received by a chart via some
class that implements Sequence. This is essentially a single method
class whose method returns a double. Thus, for chart building I'm
thinking of introspecting the model and returning all the methods that
return a number. These can be wrapped in a dynamically compiled
sequence. Something similar could be done for histograms. 

However, this approach sort of bothers me in that it assumes the methods
of interest are already defined. Maybe we also need to iterate over all
the agents calling some method on each one and then plot the average,
for example. I don't want to do too much here as Tom and I are keen to
get 2.0 out the door as its been a bit delayed as he and I have been
writing models. So, any comments?

Also, Gulya had a good suggestion about remembering the position and
sizes of windows and so forth. If this is to be done between runs, but
not between application instances then no problem. If we want to do it
between application instances, and I think we do, then we'll need to use
a file format to store this info. Java 1.4's new property mechanism
would be good for this, but 1.4 is not really available for the Mac yet.
So, I'm thinking a simple XML format. I'd go with java's properties
format, but I think we'd might grow out of that at some time. We could
also store the new display surface size now that we have draggable
resizeable surfaces (something I'd actually started before I saw Mile's
presentation!). We may also want to store dynamic charts (as described
above) between runs and instances. Comments?

Nick

-- 
Nick Collier 
Social Science Research Computing 
University of Chicago 
http://repast.sourceforge.net