A general 2D visualization prototyping module
Project description
- SUMMON is a python extension module that provides rapid prototyping of
2D visualizations. By heavily relying on the python scripting language, SUMMON allows the user to rapidly prototype a custom visualization for their data, without the overhead of a designing a graphical user interface or recompiling native code. By simplifying the task of designing a visualization, users can spend more time on understanding their data.
SUMMON was designed with several philosophies. First, recompilation should be avoided in order to speed up the development process. Second, design of graphical user interfaces should also be minimized. Designing a good interface takes planning and time to layout buttons, scrollbars, and dialog boxes. Yet a poor interface is very painful to work with. Even when one has a good interface, rarely can it be automated for batch mode. Instead, SUMMON relies on the python terminal for most interaction. This allows the users direct access to the underlining code, which is more expressive, and can be automated through scripting.
Lastly, SUMMON is designed to be fast. Libraries already exist for accessing OpenGL in python. However, python is relatively slow for real-time interaction with large visualizations (trees with 100,000 leaves, matrices with a million non-zeros, etc.). Therefore, all real-time interaction is handled with compiled native C++ code. Python is only executed in the construction and occasional interaction with the visualization. This arrangement provides the best of both worlds.
