To cut a long story short, Torkild and I immediately
started talking about this idea of spinning these viz
capabilities off at the bar on Sunday night because it
might help him out. On Monday night we had a very good
discussion about visualization capabilities at the joint
Science+LocationTech+IoT birds of a feather meeting.
Each of the groups need good visualization capabilities
and it seems that both within and across the groups we
have technologies that we need/could share. For example,
IoT could use help visualizing time-series data, which
both Science and LocationTech do. We had another
discussion about it over dinner on Monday night and
finally at lunch yesterday Tamar Cohen got us started on
a discussion about 3d visualization for what I consider
to be input or model generation or "front-end" tasks as
opposed to post processing. That is, things like
constructive solid geometry and mesh editing. Part of
this discussion focused on whether or not we can replace
JME3 with a JavaFX-based alternative since JME3 was not
approved through the CQ process because of underlying
contribution tracking issues with LWJGL.
I think given the awesome discussion surrounding this
that we need to go ahead and put together a
cross-working group 3d visualization project with
initial committers from all three working groups and an
initial contribution from ORNL and any others who have
something they want in there from the start. I am happy
to do the leg work to write the proposal and lead the
project until it is off the ground, but in the long-term
I think we need to find a "viz person" to lead it.
I suggest that we reach out to Nebula as well and
determine how this project relates to their existing
Visualization effort, which contains the SWT-XY-Graph
bundles that most of us use. I should mention that
during our discussions we discovered that there are some
issues with those bundles that are directly affecting
several of our projects in Science.
Let me take a minute to describe the initial
contribution that ORNL would make. We would move two
pieces from ICE into this new project (assuming that is
allowed by the Foundation). First, we typically use
third-party visualization tools like VisIt and Paraview,
so what we have developed is essentially some OSGi and
Eclipse infrastructure for dealing with "the plumbing"
associated with connecting external tools and native
capabilities. The idea is that given a particular
visualization tool, we just realize these interfaces and
then publish it as an OSGi declarative service. At that
point, the tools can be used to draw on SWT Composites
anywhere in the workbench instead of in a single
perspective or spot. They also publish their preferences
in the Preferences menu and Jordan has connected
everything to secure persistent storage for handling
passwords to remote visualization clusters.
See the attached picture of a fuel pellet mesh embedded
into an Eclipse Form Editor. It was rendered with VisIt
in an external process and piped back to ICE. Previously
we could only do this in a dedicated "Visualization
Perspective."
Second, Jordan has also started developing a
JavaFX-based replacement for our JME3 geometry builder
and mesh editor. This includes, as I understand it,
extensions to the JavaFX scene graph to provide cameras
and other classes that are similar in function to those
of JME3 and not currently available in JavaFX.
I would like to sum up this very long email by again
asking for your thoughts and comments. I see this as a
good and necessary step that will only be successful if
we work together.
Best,
Jay
--
Jay Jay Billings
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Twitter Handle: @jayjaybillings
