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Re: [buckminster-dev] Dependency Visualization 
Well yes,
I don't really want to go through the pain of having to install the EMF plug-ins (ouch!) just to use Buckminster. I really hope you're not going on that path because that sounds really terrible. I hope P2 changes things, but installing EMF has been an incredible pain up to now. Really, that's en emphatic no-no; I'd be really unhappy to see EMF dependencies pulled in, just to use Buckminster. Actually, I have to sit down, now. The idea of all that bloat is making my tummy ache. 

Zest is just a wrapper around draw2D, and that's a totally different matter.

Best regards,
Dann



Thomas Hallgren wrote:

Hi Dann,
A Buckminster runtime is one thing, the tools used to maintain it another. The runtime should be kept mean and lean, that's for sure, and I think that is what your concern is about?
One thing that I've learned about EMF the last couple of weeks is that the runtime instances that it creates are very optimized and in many cases far more optimal then the Java classes that people normally write. Booleans are grouped together as bits in integer values, same thing with enums. I'm sure there's a lot of other optimizations going on as well that I haven't found yet. All in all, I'm quite convinced that using EMF to describe things like our CSPEC, RMAP, etc. will give us a smaller, less error prone, and more efficient runtime. The actual models themselves, visualized graphically using the ecore tools diagram editor, will become valuable contributions to the documentation.
Then we have the tools surrounding it all. Editors for the model for instance. We get them for free with EMF. The generated editor can be extended and improved a lot of course, but event the bare-bone generated thing beats the hell out of using a text editor on XML documents. The generated editors are also very well crafted. Mean and lean. Easy to extend and modify.
IMO EMF will become (and in some respect already is) a very valuable tool for us. Not sure I see why you'd think otherwise.
I have no experience with Zest but from the looks of it, it brings us a very good dependency visualization and that is something that we have been longing for for some time now. Installing it will be optional of course. 

Regards,
Thomas Hallgren


Dann Martens wrote:

Wait a minute,
EMF? Zest, sure, but I would hope we could keep that behemoth out of there, we're talking a configuration management tool here. 

Best regards,
 Dann



Guillaume Chatelet wrote:

Wow Johannes ! This looks great : )
UI is actually an issue in Buckminster and EMF + Zest will do a good job here. Very cool : ) 

Best regards,
Guillaume
On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 11:25 PM, Johannes Utzig <mail@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:mail@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote: 

    Hi,

    as discussed in
http://dev.eclipse.org/newslists/news.eclipse.tools.buckminster/msg01102.html 
    I started working on a zest based component dependency viewer for
    buckminster.
    I just finished an early prototype and thought it's enough to  get
    at least an idea and ask you guys what kinds of features you'd like
    to see in it.

    Currently this is (for sake of simplicity) registered as an editor
    for previously saved .bom files.
    It consists of 3 areas

     -navigation tree that shows a tree of the component dependencies
    and is used to drill down on the graph. The selection is linked to
the graph viewer so if you select a component in the tree, only this 
    specific subtree is revealed in the graph.

     -graph viewer. This is very basic at the moment. It shows the
dependency graph with some icons depending on the component type and 
    highlights the direct dependencies of the selected component.
    Unresolved nodes are shown in red, a double-click on a node reveals
    the node's cspec and that's about it :)
-settings section. This section lets you choose between some layout 
    algorithms and filters (only platform component filter so far).
Filters are applied to both the navigation tree and the graph viewer. 

    I came up with the following things that should be added:
    -better highlighting
-tooltips and properties view that reveal more details of each component 
    -smart highlighting of paths through the graph (shortest path to
    root request for example)
    -regex based filter (black and white list filter)
    -dependency reports generated from a bom with some nice pictures
    -zooming
    -image export

    Now I'd be very interested to hear what's on your wish-list for
dependency visualization, so that I can plan on the real implementation. 
    Attached is a screenshot and a bundle.jar including source code.
Just throw it in your dropins folder to try, but make sure that zest 
    is installed.
    Keep in mind, this is just an early prototype for demonstration and
my first steps with zest, so the code is super ugly at the moment... 

    Best regards,
    Johannes

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