On Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 8:56 PM, ghtdak <gl...@tarbox.org> wrote: > > > On Jan 9, 7:50 pm, ghtdak <gl...@tarbox.org> wrote: >> On Jan 9, 2:20 am, Alejandro Serrano <trup...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> > Hi, >> > I'm currently developing something very similar as the thing you are >> > proposing. I sent it to the list about two months ago >> > (http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel/browse_thread/thread/53b3d6... > > I took a look and its interesting. But I have some questions. > Perhaps, though, it might be easier to describe what I was trying and > why so you could contrast your approach. > > First, it seemed that exploiting the existing notebook capabilities > was going to yield the best reward / effort. Knowing that QtWebKit > and the browser demo which comes with the Qt distro works with Sage, I > figured that the easiest first cut would be to build a simple > application with an embedded browser window and hook into the > underlying Sage Notebook server process. This way, all the notebook > code could be exploited and I could focus on whatever specific > weirdness I wanted without needing to do major surgery. > > Unfortunately, this approach wasn't possible with the Sage Notebook > process as it existed primarily because it wasn't an asynchronous > process. It blocks on the pipe to the main Twisted Server process. I > had some luck using Python threads for some workarounds but, > unfortunately, this made nailing the Qt main loop tricky because Qt > really wants a single thread for gui applications... Since I was using > PyQt I didn't know what tricks I would need to try when integrating > with Cython etc... so I kinda punted. > > Some things have changed. First, it is more straightforward to create > a custom python process using Cython. While I haven't tried it, it > seems that one could start up all the Qt stuff before invoking the > notebook process code... this approach requires understanding how the > Twisted server worked and getting in the middle of the notebook > process launch... I don't think its very hard but the few times I > poked around didn't yield much success. Even with this approach, > however, threads would be needed meaning synchronization etc and I > think it would be architecturally incorrect. > > There was occasional back and forth on making the notebook process > asynchronous. I haven't been following so don't know if asynchronous > is part of the current notebook rewrite effort. > > In my perfect world, I would have an asynchronous sage notebook > process supporting the browser window... which would require no code > change to Sage, and I would simply add components to the event loop to > support other activities. For example, Mayavi2 could work alongside > the notebook sharing the underlying data structures with no concern > for synchronization which could get tricky. Extensions could be > written to support notebook invocations of Mayavi2 but they could come > in time... custom widgets would initially be used that would have no > impact on the Sage baseline code. > > I previously built a Twisted Qt Reactor to do this for PyQt but it > requires that the supported processes be asynchronous... which the > sage notebook wasn't and may still not be (again haven't been > following) > > In looking at your code, it "appears" that you're providing some > capabilities which might be more easily handled in the notebook. I > really liked the variables being shown and I believe you're thinking > along some of the lines I was originally. But you mentioned you were > using threads and I wonder why and what kind... this will require more > looking on my part. > > I should say that my primary interest in having the notebook be > asynchronous was to interact with external systems. This is a > requirement which isn't shared by many in the Sage community so it > hasn't been a priority. It is also a non-trivial adjustment to the > notebook itself... the combination may preclude its development. > > -glenn >
Are you putting the notebook, GUI, and Sage compute all in the same process? How many processes do you have and how do they communicate? William
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