RE: [mylar-dev] zest and mylar

["Mik Kersten" <beatmik@xxxxxxx>]

Yup--we aren't able to show the full Mylar context model in tree views like
the Package Explorer, because the model contains degree-of-interest
weightings for relations in addition to elements.  To get an idea of how the
model works check out the "under the hood" part of the EclipseCon
presentation, but note that the animation doesn't demonstrate edge
weighting: http://www.eclipse.org/mylar/about.php 

Mylar is all about productivity, and we restrain from adding any features to
the distribution that do not make the contributors more productive.  So we
actually have stable Visualiser (http://www.eclipse.org/ajdt/visualiser/)
integration contributed by Wesley Coelho that hasn't been released.  The
challenge with any of the visualizations has been that their information
density is really low, so when coding it has been hard for us to find room
on a display to keep these up.  Frankly I don't have Active Search up unless
I'm on my 1920x1200 display (but we're exploring fixing that by exposing it
as an in-place view).

But high display resolutions are steadily getting more affordable, and
recently two non-coding use cases came up for visualizing contexts:

1) Previewing context from the server.  Before overwriting your local
context with one or more contexts attached to a repository report we need to
'see' what we're going to get.  We can easily expose this as a Task called
"Context" which displays the Visualiser and assigns separate highlight
colors the local and server contexts.

2) Code review.  We use the Task Activity view for planning, and it would be
nice to see all the code that changed during the week, or as part of several
related tasks.  The Visualiser can show this as well.

While it's up-side is that it shows a very obvious and predictable
visualization, the Visualiser does not show relations between elements.  So
if (1) and (2) end up being useful they could be a candidate for higher
fidelity Zest visualizations.

Mik
 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: mylar-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:mylar-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx]
> On Behalf Of Ian Bull
> Sent: Friday, March 31, 2006 7:50 AM
> To: Mylar developer discussions
> Subject: Re: [mylar-dev] zest and mylar
> 
> Hi Ivica,
> 
> I am almost ready to submit an entire refactoring of the Zest nested
> viewer.  I am just trying to hammer out some performance problems that
> only seem to appear under Linux.
> 
> When Mik first started working on Mylar, we had some ideas that maybe we
> could use Mylar to help filter large visualizations.  I was working on
> the Zest project and since Zest is supposed to conform to the same
> interfaces that other JFace views have, it seemed like it could work.
> Mik has done a great job getting Mylar working with the JDT and
> incorporating it into the IDE.  We are hopefully going to meet in April
> to see if it still makes sense to apply Mylar to Visualizations.
> 
> You are right, Zest can also (and should) help show the Degree of
> Interest model.
> 
> Cheers,
> Ian
> 
> Ivica Aracic wrote:
> > dear mylar and zest developers,
> >
> > browsing the mylar repository I've noticed the zest subproject.
> > it seems to me that it provides support for construction of
> > sophisticated visualizations.
> > i've also noticed that mylar runs independently of zest.
> > so my question is what is the relation between these two projects?
> > zest seems to me like predestinated for visualizing mylar's working
> > sets including relations between elements of the working set which are
> > not obvious from the editor and common eclipse views.
> >
> > thank you!
> > ivica aracic
> > _______________________________________________
> > mylar-dev mailing list
> > mylar-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
> > https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/mylar-dev
> 
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