Re: GNUMERIC: bad news/good news

[Havoc Pennington <rhpennin midway uchicago edu>]

On Tue, 15 Sep 1998, Todd Graham Lewis wrote:
> 
> What is the roadmap with gnumeric again, with respect to graphing?
> 

One idea, if it works, is to use Guppi's facilities via CORBA. I've moved
everything around in Guppi so that it is now only a small (for C++)
program which allows you to browse sets of data and plots of data. Sets of
data and plots of data are types defined in a 'libguppi'; libguppi is also
used by loadable gmodules which know how to create particular kinds of
plot. The only existing plot type is "ScatterPlot," but once the proper
infrastructure is in place lots of different kinds can be written
relatively quickly.

This arrangement makes it easy to write CORBA servers that can provide a
particular plot type (or a single server providing them all, I don't know
which way will be best). They can link with libguppi and load an
appropriate module. Guppi itself can also be a server, e.g. if it's
already running or you want to apply some heavy duty statistics to your
spreadsheet. 

I have IDL for the server, and basically know what's involved in writing
it (nothing very hard), but I am kind of stalling around since C++ CORBA
bindings would be nice and I have other stuff to do first anyway. Plus one
can only keep up with so many unstable libraries at a time.

The IDL for the plot server is generic though, comprising the Gnome::Plot
module, so anyone will be able to write their own servers in whatever
language they like. 

Havoc