Small Sharp Visual Tools

Presenter: David Morrill <dmorrill@enthought.com>

Affiliation: Enthought, Inc.

Borrowing from the *nix tradition of creating "small sharp tools" for command shell use, this talk will explore the idea of creating "small sharp visual tools". The idea is to create suites of small tools (usually implemented as plugins), each of which performs a single, well-defined visual function, and then allow the user to connect them together in various ad-hoc and free-form ways to create new higher-level tools.

While this approach is still in an embryonic form, more than two dozen such tools have already been created. The talk will demonstrate several of these tools in use, taking examples from a couple of different domains, including program debugging and data visualization.

The environment in which these tools operate use several packages from ETS (the Enthought Tool Suite), including Envisage (plugin framework), Traits (type checking, event notification, UI construction) and PyFace (UI components). The tool suite itself also makes use of several other ETS packages, including Chaco (interactive 2D plotting) and NumericContext (array based scientific/engineering computation and UI pipeline construction).

The core architecture for interconnecting visual tools is provided by DockWindowFeature, an extension to the PyFace DockWindow component which allows new "features" to be added to an application environment. Ten features have been created so far, although the talk will focus only on the few of those directly related to tool interconnection.