[Nipy-devel] attributes vs. traits

[Jonathan Taylor]

Jarrod Millman wrote:

>
> For example, I think it is the case that most scientific programmers 
> are using
> matplotlib as opposed to enthought's chaco.  The enthought team has 
> certainly
> done some impressive work developing traits, but it would be good to know
> if there are any scientific projects using it.  I went through the
> google hits for
> "python traits" and they all seemed to be enthought generated content.


good point about matplotlib vs. chaco. though chaco's goals are 
different then matplotlib's. chaco is aiming for interactivity, i.e. 
application building whereas matplotlib is aimed at publication quality 
graphics.

re: numpy/scipy not using traits: it makes sense for to not pollute the 
numpy and scipy code with traits because they are not aimed at being 
applications, but libraries. on the other hand, we clearly want to build 
applications.

as i understand it from reading the enthought-dev list and having heard 
talk of it at scipy, enthought has plans to officially release envisage. 
currently, the code is available but not officially released.

if i recall correctly, john hunter has been talking to the enthought 
guys about being able to use matplotlib into an envisage plugin -- there 
is even a copy of the enthought.traits source tree in matplotlib's svn 
repository.

what would be very helpful is a "hello chaco" example in envisage, 
and/or a "hello pylab".

i have been working on putting together some "decent" trait_views with 
some "actions" for the FIAC example ($NIPY/examples/FIAC/traits). the 
file "ui_view_action.py" is a VERY lightweight application that would 
allow you to plot the design (if i could drop matplotlib into 
enthought), and run a single run analysis. i'm not claiming that this is 
a pretty interface, but it is very easy to generalize/reuse -- i suppose 
it is a disposable gui application. i started with the VET tool, looked 
at its output, read some source and that's about it. from looking at the 
examples, i think that this code is the kind of thing that can be 
dropped into an envisage plugin (i think everything is based on pyface 
somewhere underneath).

my feeling is that there is something to be gained from using traits and 
continuing to think about envisage. if i can make the foundations of a 
lightweight gui application on a flight and a train trip, then i think 
there is something there. i have briefly looked at other things like 
glade and quickly became lost. one of the really nice things is that the 
code that generates the gui(which is based on the code generated by VET) 
is very easy to read. i am so dense with gui code, i can't even read the 
arrayview.py in our visualization package.

instead of poring through google result to see how many people reference 
traits, etc. i propose that we:

i) send an email to enthought-dev asking for some help on a "hello 
chaco" example (i would prefer "hello pylab" but that is more 
complicated right now)
ii) see if we can get some simple visualization tool working

one of the best motto (mantra?) that i heard repeated numerous times at 
scipy was

"functioning code wins all arguments"

(as opposed to "google search results win all arguments"  :) )

i agree with the former and think we should try as a group to get a 
"functioning" envisage example. in the process, we might build the first 
non-enthought envisage application (with lots of documentation of course 
:)). this would also be a good faith effort to encourage envisage to 
officially release envisage.

best,

jonathan

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I'm part of the Team in Training: please support our efforts for the
Leukemia and Lymphoma Society!

http://www.active.com/donate/tntsvmb/tntsvmbJTaylor

GO TEAM !!!

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jonathan Taylor                           Tel:   650.723.9230
Dept. of Statistics                       Fax:   650.725.8977
Sequoia Hall, 137                         www-stat.stanford.edu/~jtaylo
390 Serra Mall
Stanford, CA 94305