gled

The following are current news about the Gled project. Older news ...

Version 1.2.5 is available for download.

This release of Gled encompasses many usability improvements stemming from the development of the Event Visualization Framework for ALICE experiment at CERN.

Release highlights:

• application startup steering has been improved and modularized
• C++ scripting control enhancements (in view of script-defined global variable management); several demo-scripts can now be executed in the same process
• addition of PERL regular expressions (provided by direct inclusion of PCRE-5.0 and PME-1.0.3)
• generalization and beautification of GUI elements:
  • class-view: collapse by parent-class; support for link-views; new method call button weedget that supports functions with arguments; drag-and-drop support
  • shell beautification; support swallowing of other windows
  • object browser (nest): improved custom layout handling
  • generalized mechanism for spawning of GUI elements facilitating user extensions and custom GUI's
  • meta-GUI classes: description of GUI layouts in Gled-object structure
• GL rendering improvements:
  • A_Rnr, object-renderer base-class, now receives change notifications and has full-control over render-scheme creation.
  • render driver provides a generick render-state-modification stack: arbitrary objects that influence course or style of rendering can be easily stored and retrieved by object-renderes
  • render driver's position-matrix stack has been optimised for speed
  • preliminary support for offscreen rendering into pbuffers
  • camera control improvements
• Geom1 libset: ACTC triangle-strip generator and triangle-mesh renderer (smooth and flat shading) have been added
• new libset Audio1, a minimal interface to OpenAL audio library
• new libset EHS, an experimental interface to the Embedded HTTP Server EHS

See change logs for details.

Gled-1.2.4 is available for download. Release highlights:

• support for detached execution of method invocation requests: methods tagged to execute that way are processed in a dedicated thread
• build system:
  • clean compile on 64-bit architectures
  • build of GUI and rendering libraries can be turned off on configure time
• new command-line options: output and message reporting can be redirected to files; creation of message window can be suppressed
• class catalog infrastructure has been cleaned-up and improved
• auto-generated HTML documentation now includes class hierarchy page and an alphabetical index
• ZNode, the base-class for building geometric hierarchies, now offers relative order-of-magnitude scaling
• many improvements in the GUI elements:
  • a method-call widget (supports glass arguments and basic types) and support for displaying ROOT-objects in class-view widget
  • better handling of custom widget layouts, tooltips added when needed
  • GL rendering: object name-tags can be rendered and object picking has been improved
• extensions in Geom1 libset:
  • shadowing of images has been implemented in ZImage class (automatic unloading after use, e.g. after the texture is pushed to GL)
  • new classes MultiBoard (showing a sequence of images/textures, e.g. a slide presentation) and Amphitheatre (for placement of objects on predefined positions; also provides animation of objects moving towards the available "seats")
  • texturing in SMorph and Board classes now supports arbitrary texture coordinate limits (sub-portions of textures and tiling)
  • texture animation in class WSSeed; new class WSTube for connecting two nodes with a Bezier curve tube (provides animated connection and objects traveling along the curve)
• GTS libset: interface to GTS's surface refinement and coarsening functions has been added (class GTSRetriangulator)
• new libset RootGeo, an interface for browsing and viewing of ROOT detector geometry description

See change logs for details.

Gled-1.2.3 is available for download. Release highlights:

• many improvements to the core-system:
  • object deletion
  • remote method call processing and exception reporting
  • thread and inter-thread-communication handling
  • special server thread for postponed MIR execution
• preliminary support for reverse-references
• support for parsing enums in C++ header files and automatic creation of menu widgets
• transition to ROOT's matrix/vector classes
• new classes (GL-text support, GL-rendering state control and custom color gradients importable from gimp)
• drag-and-drop support
• camera handling -- it is now possible to:
  • attach a camera to a given object (presumably moving)
  • specify a reference object for "up" axis
  • specify a "look-at" object
• neater widget packing (actually measuring the label widths)
• interface to create GTS surfaces from formulas
• and, of course, many minor improvements and fixes

See change logs for details and screenshots for visual teasers.

Gled-1.2.2 is available for download. Release highlights:

• Implementation of authentication and authorization infrastructure
  Gled now offers an elaborate representation of basic concepts needed for implementation of authentication and authorization:
  • Identities and group identities (ZIdentity, ZGroupIdentity). Identities are checked by RSA-encrypted challenge-response mechanism.
  • Connections (clients/proxies and viewers), implemented via glass ZMirEmittinEntity with sub-classes SaturnInfo and EyeInfo.
  • Authorization classes that allow or disallow MIR execution on a given object. This is implemented via the base class ZMirFilter with sub-classes to perform specific authorization tasks (e.g. ZIdentityFilter, ZFilterAggregator, etc).
  All these objects are fully Gled enabled and can thus be controlled with its standard mechanisms. See Authentication & Authorization Infrastructure of Gled for details.
• Synchronous MIR execution
  MIRs can now be executed synchronously by suspending the calling thread until the MIR has been executed or the error is returned. For beams (MIRs that execute on a single Saturn) an arbitrary datagram can be returned to the caller thus enabling implementation of complex data exchange protocols.
• Queens now offer a directory service with fast retrieval of objects besed on their path (e.g. ZGlass* g = queen->Query("Auth/Identities/sun.absolute"))
• HTML class documentation
• Some minor improvements and fixes

See ChangeLog of GledCore and ChangeLog of gled-build for details.

There is a new version of the article describing basic elements of Gled available from the documentation page.
It contains results of performance measurements of the MIR processing infrastructure. To recapitulate ... Gled is fast! It can process 35,000 remote method invocation requests per second on a Pentium-III 1GHz over a 100 Mbps ethernet (~700 kByte/s).
The code used to run the tests was implemented in Gled itself and is available, along with some improvements and bug fixes, from the CVS.

Changes from 1.2.0:

• build procedure now more standard
• dependence on LinuxThreads specifics has been removed: Gled is now POSIX threads compliant
• server protocol for accepting connections has been rewritten
• some new classes and features in the Geom1 libset:
  • better support for textures
  • textured SMorph
  • new classes WS_Seed and WS_Point
• ftp directory structure has been improved (hopefully)
• some other minor improvements and fixes

• GledCore:
  • gled threads are now POSIX compliant;
  • server code for accepting connection has been rewritten.
• Geom1:
  • SMorph can now be textured by a ZImage (Mercator projection);
  • ZImage is extended to hold GL environment texturing parameters;
  • demos/Geom1 have been updated to show the new capabilities, e.g. screenshot.

For more details see mailing list archives or ChangeLogs from viewcvs.

The FTW_Nest (lens browser) now shows class, name and title for below-mouse FTW_Leaf (lens-view). For FTW_Ants (link-views) it also shows the link declaration and information about the lens the link is pointing to.

The code is available from the CVS.

There are some new additions in the cvs:

• demos have been checked in; for each libset you can get them by:

     cvs co demos/<libset>
  

  or ... if you want to grab all of them:

     cvs co demos
  

• GledCore:
  • a fix in Saturn initialization;
  • stamping methods in ZGlass and ZList are now virtual
• Geom1: new classes WSSeed and WSPoint; see WS_demo.C in demos/Geom1

  Using these classes you can produce axially symmetric curved "tubes". You might find it hard to believe, but this was the original goal of the Gled project: to allow several users to cooperatively edit such shapes. For an example see the image.

The viewcvs tool for browsing of the CVS repository has been installed. You can access it from here. It is also linked from the download page.