On 1/6/07, Stefano Mazzocchi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > NOTE: RT stands for "random thoughts". This is a tradition that I > initiated in the Apache Cocoon community back in the days and I would > like to initiate it here as well now that we are reaching a fairly large > pool of talented readers.
Lovely practice. Do tell if I'm fluctuating too far off core topic -- I tell myself that sharing relevant background, context and experiences could be useful both for the subject matter and as bits of a character portrait of us (as, frankly, I'd be interested in the same spotlight peek at most of the talent gathered here). I realize there is a sweet-spot between that and not swamping the list, though, but presume our friendly neighbourhood moderators will poke us if we lead it too far astray. :-) > A few weeks ago, we reached the limit of how many 'datapoints' ploticus > can handle and we had to turn off the plotting stage... meaning that the > data is being updated, but the plots are not (they are lagging behind). Curiosity query: in which way did you hit the roof? It does not strike me as a tool that should be much harder to make scale than, say, rrdtool, which handles impressive data sets beautifully. I'm interested, not for challenging the statement, but on grounds of being able to change that, or understanding the situation enough to get a clear picture of whether it would even be a good idea in the first place. Thanks a ton for opening (and/or pointing to) the repository to introspection, by the way; I'm *very* interested in visualization engines, emergent behaviour around their adoption and how they help empower development processes. The (commit timeline centric) cvs browser we made for the Pike programming language and Roxen repositories (later adopted and refined as Opera Software's internal ditto) quickly rose to become essential infrastructure, and does marvels for productivity and (geographically dispersed) devs to stay on top of what happens in the codebase. http://pike.ida.liu.se/development/cvs/pike.xml > Ploticus is fast and relatively easy to use, but it is clear that it > would be way better to have more interactivity in such time charts. Agreed; the interconnectedness of views typically counts for a substantial fraction of the usefulness of tools like these (once implemented). Even very rough and sketchy matches between a graph and the data it pictures (if available as other information systems) can be very useful -- the initially-eye-candy-obly "new source code" graphs at http://pike.ida.liu.se/ suddenly got thoroughly useful once I linked them up with the checkin view they are metrics of. > So now I wonder: should we incorporate time series plotting into > Timeline or write something else entirely? I'm somewhat biased towards growing these things into Exhibit rather than Timeline, but that might be exploding scope? IMO, as long as user interface concerns are not compromised, usefulness grows with your options to operate on data, filtering, resorting, reconnecting and situating data sets. > And if we incorporate it, how? and what technology should we use? flash, > canvas, svg, java? The lighter-weight for end users, the better. I'd preference-rank the above (first most preferred) svg, canvas, flash, java, svg winning with a very small margin over canvas for being reactive to model / view / controller style programming on a technical level, where canvas is more of a throw-away etch-a-sketch surface. > And what features should we have? I think some sort of zooming is a must > as plots tend to exhibit different features on different scales... how > about toggling between linear and logarithmic scales? Both very interesting ideas. I'll probably noodle on the issues and questions you raise for some time and get back with more thoughts and reflections as the thread progresses. -- / Johan Sundström, http://ecmanaut.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://simile.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/general
