Guppi Update: It's Alive!

[Jon Trowbridge <trow emccta com>]

After a few weeks essentially computer-free weeks around Christmas
(checking e-mail and playing Quake3 with my cousins doesn't *really*
count as using a computer, does it?), I'm back to hacking on Guppi.
My pace has really picked up in the last week or so; I'm going to be
disappointed if guppi3 doesn't nab a top slot in the "Hacking
Activity" section of Havoc's Gnome Summary. :-)

Anyway, all of this work has led to a (small) breakthrough.  A few
minutes ago, I produced the first data plot from within Guppi.
Admittedly, things are at a very primitive state:
  * You can currently only make a plot from the guile terminal, not
    by pointing-and-clicking.
  * No axes yet.
  * There is no control over the style of the plot.
  * Navigation, zooming, and brushing, etc., while mostly implemented,
    are still not hooked in.
(One could also argue that this milestone has been pretty late in
coming --- after all, I've been hacking on guppi3 since November!)

Still, it was satisfying to actually see a plot pop up.  The best part
is that the plotting isn't just hacked into the app, but is actually
using a (IMHO) nice general plotting framework that should be cleanly
able to handle arbitrarily complex "plot geometry" (layered plots,
stacked plots, plots arranged in a grid, etc.) and multiple plot types
(lines & curves, "pop charts" like pie and bar charts, price charts,
etc.)

Another feature didn't take all that much code to implement, but think
that it is cool enough to mention: I've embedded guile-gtk and
guile-gnome into Guppi.  My plan has always been for all interesting
parts of Guppi's functionality to be fully accessible from guile.
This addition insures that the full power of gtk+ and GNOME will also
be available to guile scripts, allowing Guppi's user interface to be
extended in arbitrarily complex ways.  (Thanks to Marius Vollmer for
answering my really brain-damaged questions about guile-{gtk,gnome}.)

My current plan is to get the bare minimum point-and-click plot
creation implemented, and then to make the first guppi3 tarball
release.  With this in mind, I've been trying to give Guppi all of the
trappings of a proper GNOME application: I've added a doc/ directory
with a skeletal user's manual, a guppi.desktop file... I even cooked
up a simple Guppi icon.

More importantly, I've fixed Guppi's build so that "make install" will
do the right thing.  All hardwired paths have been excised from the
app, so it is no longer assumed that you are running guppi from inside
of the build directory.

I also revised the web page at www.gnome.org/guppi.  (I thought that
I'd announced this to the list, but I don't see the post in the
archive of guppi-list.)  Feel free to stop by sometime.

I'm expecting that another week of coding will get things to the point
where a tarball release isn't purely absurd.  I'll (of course)
announce to the list when it is ready for download.  Until then, feel
free to grab the code out of CVS and try building it.  I'd
particularly appreciate hearing whether or not Guppi builds properly
on non-x86 and non-GNU/Linux systems.

-JT

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