> Rich Krauter wrote: >> >> Hello, >> >> I am a relatively new user of matplotlib; thank you to the matplotlib team >> for this excellent package. >> I have a question about serializing matplotlib figures. I have searched for >> serialization options for matplotlib figures but have not found much >> information. I am interested to hear about serialization use cases and the >> approaches others use in these cases. >> >> Here is the reason I am asking: >> >> My use case for serialization is that I want to build a CouchDB database of >> matplotlib figures. The database could be accessed from a web application >> (in my case I want to build a django app to create, edit and manage figures) >> or desktop gui, or whatever. For storage of the figures in CouchDB, I am >> working on JSON representations of matplotlib figures. The JSON could be >> run through simple python functions to regenerate the matplotlib figures. I >> have very simple working examples, but to more completely test out this >> approach I would attempt to recreate the plots in the matplotlib gallery >> using JSON representations and a small set of (hopefully) very simple python >> functions which would process the JSON markup. >> >> Before I get too far, I wanted to see what others have done for similar use >> cases, make sure I am not missing existing approaches, etc. I am getting >> ahead of myself now, but if there is broader interest in this approach, and >> no other better solutions exist, I would set up a project on Google Code or >> some other site to work on this.
On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 1:15 PM, Michael Droettboom <md...@stsci.edu> wrote: > > What is the advantage of JSON (is this specific case) over Python source > code? matplotlib is designed around it and it's more flexible. Unless > you're planning on automatically manipulating the JSON, I don't see why you > wouldn't just use Python source. > > Mike > Mike, I don't know that there is much of a benefit to JSON outside of my use case or similar use cases. I want to manipulate the JSON representation of a figure within a javascript-based web interface to provide dynamic plotting through a web page. I also want to be able to store and query JSON representations using CouchDB. I am probably not exactly clear on what you mean by "using python source" to represent a figure. Is there a standard agreed upon way to do this? I do have python source code representations of figures. i.e. I have dict representations of matplotlib figures. The dicts have a "required" internal structure. I feed the dict to a function which regenerates the figure graphic from that structure. If I want to update the plot, I just change the contents of the dict data structure representing the plot, not the source code that is used to generate the figure. If I instead had a JSON object representation of a figure, I would convert it to a python dict and use the same function as before to produce the figure. I haven't found much discussion about serialization of matplotlib figures, but I probably have not searched well enough, or maybe it is not a high interest topic. The discussion I have found seems to suggest using the script you used to create the figure as the serialization of that figure. To modify the figure, you modify the script an rerun it. What I would like to have (and what I have some very preliminary examples for) are versioned data structures that can be converted to matplotlib figures without modifying any python source code (other than the structured representation of the figure itself.) However, I don't know how much the matplotlib API changes, and an approach like this may be very sensitive to those changes. Rich ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Matplotlib-users mailing list Matplotlib-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/matplotlib-users
