Re: GUI [was: Re: Possible (summer of code) projects for Octave)

[John Swensen]

On Jan 5, 2011, at 11:02 PM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:

> On 4 January 2011 21:47, Thomas Yengst <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Not so much a GUI, but what Octave needs is a Workspace (in Matlab's
>> sense) that shows variables, dimensions, bytes, etc.
> 
> The current contenders for the GUI throne already do that.
> 
> I think I agree with Søren's ideas, though. If we are to properly
> integrate something like OctaveDE or QtOctave into Octave, we first
> need to implement some C++ functions in core. I've added it to the
> wishlist:
> 
>     http://wiki.octave.org/wiki.pl?Projects
> 
> - Jordi G. H.

If you look at the source code repository for OctaveDE, there is already an 
attempt to do that.  It is a class called Octave server.  It is a class that 
hooks into the idle event loop for readline and does transactions with Octave 
during the idle event loop.  This *should* be inherently thread safe, as Octave 
is doing nothing while the readline idle event loop is running. I proposed this 
be included in the Octave sources a while back, but I don't think there was 
much interest.

There are some things that an IDE can place a request to the octave_server and 
the data will be retrieved on the next call to the idle event loop (e.g. the 
contents of a specific variable, placing or clearing breakpoints, etc), there 
are some things that get requested every time it runs (e.g. any additions to 
the command history or the names, types, and sizes of the variables in scope).  
The octave_server maintains a copy of these items until they have been 
retrieved by the IDE and uses mutexes to ensure thread safety of the IDE and 
readline idle event loop accessing octave_server.

The octave_server has absolutely no dependence on OctaveDE and could trivially 
be pulled into any other project (IDE or no) that wishes to request/retrieve 
this kind of data from Octave in a threadsafe manner.

John