| Re: [ice-dev] Using Viz in our RCP application |
Havard,
I'm CC'ing the ICE dev mailing on this incase any of our viz folks want to speak up.
I guess I misspoke. I thought most of our changes to break dependencies had been merged into master. They should certainly be available in origin/UnifiedVizRefactor_NoReactor. My goal with the redesign and refactor was specifically to address your concerns in 1, 2 and 3.
So, will you be our test subject and try out the origin/UnifiedVizRefactor_NoReactor branch? :) Robert Smith is working very hard to address the concerns that you and I share as well as other issues. If you find problems you can open issues on Github and he can start tackling them immediately. It would be extremely valuable to us if you did this since a separate set of eyes often catches more bugs.
Jay
Hello again!
I've had another look at the ICE master branch, and it seems to me that there's a lot of dependency issues.
I haven't looked at the other feature branches available, but I can see that there are branches that (at least from the name) seems to be relevant :)
origin/jay/cleanup
origin/kgrs/viz/refactor
origin/UnifiedVizRefactor_NoReactor
What I've done so far is to clone the master branch, and only import the *.viz.* bundles into Eclipse. I also imported the org.eclipse.ice.viz.target.mars bundle, and set the target platform from it.
By doing this I'd expect to get no dependency issues, except for issues with some of the service bundles (more specifically the org.eclipse.ice.viz.service.visit and the org.eclipse.ice.viz.service.jme3 bundles, since I haven't set up any of the engines on my system).
My initial thoughts are as follows:
1) What's the main goal of this cleanup/refactoring? I'd think that the viz bundles should be pretty standalone with regards to the rest of the ICE bundles. There are direct dependencies to org.eclipse.ice.client.widgets, org.eclipse.ice.analysistool and several others. Of course if I start to add these, it just blows up with a cascade of other dependencies to other ICE bundles. I'd think that it's OK for ICE to depend on Viz for visualization, but not the other way around.
2) Viz should probably (when/if splitting part with ICE) have it's own separate target platform
3) It should be possible to just close the visit and jme3 plugins, and still don't get any errors. Right now there are dependencies from the more generic top level bundles to the visit/jme3 bundles (and even com.jme3.* in the org.eclipse.ice.viz.service.geometry bundle). In my opinion the only bundle allowed to have dependencies to com.jme3.* is the org.eclipse.ice.viz.service.jme3.* bundles.
4) I see you use jMonkeyEngine for a lot of the math. Have you considered removing these dependencies by implementing the requred math stuff yourself? (maybe in a org.eclipse.ice.viz.math bundle) or use some other third party library?
Are there any other branches where any of the mentioned issues are addressed? Or am I sort of "barking up the wrong tree" here? :)
Med vennlig hilsen / Best regards,Håvard Heierli-NesseProgramutvikler – KonstruksjonsteknikkSoftware developer – Structural engineering
MARINTEK (Norsk Marinteknisk Forskningsinstitutt AS)Address: POB 4125 Valentinlyst, NO-7450 Trondheim, NorwayMobile: +47 930 04 277
From: Jay Jay Billings [jayjaybillings@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, December 18, 2015 8:44 PM
To: McCaskey, Alex
Cc: Håvard Heierli-Nesse
Subject: Re: Using Viz in our RCP application
We are starting on the initial contribution for the Eclipse Advanced Visualization Project (EAVP). It must be approved for check-in first by the Eclipse Foundation, so I would say it will probably be available sometime in early January.You might try the latest version of ICE's master branch in the Git repo. We have refactored many parts of the org.eclipse.ice.viz bundles and you shouldn't need any additional bundles now.Havard,Very nice to meet you!
Please let me know how we can help. As Alex said, we're committed to helping you be successful with this project!
Jay
On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 2:39 PM, McCaskey, Alex <mccaskeyaj@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hello Havard,
So sorry for the late response!
I’m glad you’ve contacted me regarding the Visualization infrastructure we have in ICE. We are pulling that code out of ICE (all the org.eclipse.ice.viz.* bundles) and providing it as the initial contribution to the new Eclipse Advanced Visualization Project (EAVP). Your message is good timing - the project was just approved by the Eclipse Board this past week.
I do think that SIMA could benefit from this viz infrastructure - and the ICE team, the EAVP committers, and I would be more than happy to help you and your team get started.
As for your questions regarding the initial contribution, I’ll defer to Jay Billings (CC’ed). Jay is leading this effort to get the EAVP started and can speak better to the specifics about EAVP’s initial contribution.
Looking forward to working together on this moving forward.
Best,
Alex
On Dec 9, 2015, at 3:20 AM, Håvard Heierli-Nesse <Havard.Heierli-Nesse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hello Alex!
I don't know if you remember, but during the Eclipse Demo Camp in Trondheim, I talked briefly with you about the Viz project. Sadly you had to catch a plane, so I wasn't able to have an in-depth discussion with you about it.
As far as I understand the plan was to extract the Viz part from ICE, put it in it's own GIT repo and clean it up a little bit.
As I mentioned we're considering swithing to some other 3D engine in our RCP application (SIMA), and using Viz (maybe with jMonkeyEngine) is one of several options. I'm really eager to look into this, and I'm just wondering what the status is of this splitting/cleanup.
A couple of months ago I cloned the ICE project from here https://github.com/eclipse/ice, and looked into it a little bit (I even did some cleanup/removal of dependencies myself, just to see if I could get it integrated into SIMA somehow. Didn't take this test all the way, so I never actually got it working, but at least I've familiarized a little bit with the code.
I have several questions:
1) Is there a different repository available which I could have a look at? If not, is there a branch for this "splitting project" which is an better option for testing than master.
2) Do you have some loose timeframe for when I can expect Viz to be ready for "alpha" testing (I really don't want to have a dependency to the whole ICE project to use just the visualizatin part of it :)
I suspect that we'll have a few requirements that may not be implemented to this date, but we'll be more than happy to contribute to this project if we choose to use it (which I personally think would be a good idea).
Best regards,
Med vennlig hilsen / Best regards,Håvard Heierli-NesseProgramutvikler – KonstruksjonsteknikkSoftware developer – Structural engineering
MARINTEK (Norsk Marinteknisk Forskningsinstitutt AS)Address: POB 4125 Valentinlyst, NO-7450 Trondheim, NorwayMobile: +47 930 04 277
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Jay Jay Billings
Oak Ridge National LaboratoryTwitter Handle: @jayjaybillings