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 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 is designed to be a fast interface for developing interactive visualizations (via scene graphs) for OpenGL. Although python libraries already exist for accessing OpenGL, python is relatively slow for real-time interaction with large visualizations (trees with 100,000 leaves, sparse matrices with a million non-zeros, etc.). Therefore, with SUMMON all real-time interaction is handled with compiled native C++ code (via extension module). Python is only executed in the construction and occasional interaction with the visualization. This arrangement provides the best of both worlds.
SUMMON was designed with several philosophies. First, a scripting language (Python) is used to speed up the development process and avoid overhead such as code compilation. Second, design of graphical user interfaces should 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 prompt for most interaction. This allows the users direct access to the underlying code, which is more expressive, and can be automated through scripting.
