Thanks Peter and Alexandre for your quick answers and interest,
First, there is now a blog post with your solution and the lessons
learned on our workshop about the dynamics of it and some improvements
to be done to agile visualizations here:
http://mutabit.com/offray/static/blog/output/posts/medios-en-colombia.html
Is in Spanish, because is directed towards the local community, but some
Spanish speaking devs at Pharo/Roassal could also take advantage of it
and comment the ideas feedback them to the development process.
Second, some inline comments below.
El 23/11/14 a las #4, Alexandre Bergel escribió:
People in the workshop were interested in Roasal/Pharo but there where some
important lessons:
Yes, it takes time. Thanks for trying! This is very important!
- There is a lack of information on the basic issues (like this one). Agile
Visualization is a good start as the Object Profile gallery, but we need more
of that. This test case scenarios are useful in detecting the pending issues.
Check the chapter about Roassal on Agile Visualization.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31543901/AgileVisualization/Roassal/0104-Roassal.html
What is missing? I can add a new section, but it will repeat other part...
There is a tendency towards agile visualization from newbies in my
workshops:
1. Awesome is easy to install and quick to use, and you get beautiful
images!
2. Where the data comes from? When I explain that most of it comes from
code inside pharo (relationships on the source code) or from things like
buildEdgesFromObjects: (1 to: 20)
from: [ :n | n // 3 ]
they hit the first wall.
So, what is needed is to preserve the awesomeness of complex beautiful
visualization while making a bridge that takes the newbies from where
they are towards that visualizations.
Take for example the graph chapter[a] and imagine that after all the
current, complex and beauty visuals that work as a panoramic view of
what can be done (in a small gallery, for example, with source code
linked to it), we start from the basics and away from the specifics
software analysis. Saying something like (linking your basics to the
graphs chapter):
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Graphs can represent a lot of relationships. The previous gallery is
made using the internal relationships in the agile visualization
platform software, but we can take other relationship. For example:
"Processing a small TSV table"
tab := RTTabTable new input:
'id origin relation destiny
1 Orange is a Fruit
2 Apple is a Fruit
3 Apple has color Red
4 Rice is a Cereal'.
and lets build a graph small graph of this data:
[...]
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
[a]
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31543901/AgileVisualization/Graph/0204-Graph.html
Woud be nice to have an easy way to add tabular data, may be using GT
support for table like interfaces (as I suggested in the blog post) so
the recollection of data to make a visualization and the visualization
code can be linked together more fluidly.
In this way we can keep a balance between awesomeness and easiness.
- Would be nice to have tools for all Roassal visualizations like export as
svg. Some demos have them, some other don't, so other casual issues has a
bigger learning curve to adopt what they are seeing and use it in another
context.
Yes, we will work on that.
Thanks. The idea of putting it on GT seems the proper way to do it. The
current way of using external tools to take screenshots or the
mysterious way that uses the internal tool of Pharo or code messages are
not friendly. A explicit button/menu with explicit options to store the
images or a notification about where they are saved are the way to go
for newbies.
I would like to post the working example on the meetup page, so if any can tell
me why the example is broken or how to solve it, would be nice.
How can we help?
You have already done. Keeping this conversation on the list and/or on
the blog is a way to help and is nice to help back.
I will be in another hackaton this Friday related with GT (not with data
visualization) and another one on Dec. 6. I will keep you informed about
how they went and how can be made better.
Cheers,
Offray
