LabPlot2 for kde-edu?

[Alexander Rieder]

On Saturday 28 December 2013 10:38:27 Alexander Semke wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm one of the developers of labplot. LabPlot2 is close to its first stable
> release. The official homepage [1] is a bit outdated and will get updated in
> the next couple of days. You can have a look at some screenshots here [2]
> and here [3] if you want to know what LabPlot2 is and how it looks like.
> 
> I'm thinking about becoming an official part of kde-edu. What are the
> conditions for this?
> 
> I saw a couple of nice features in kmplot that are not available in LabPlot
> yet. I'm also thinking about Cantor and how to combine such an interface for
> different CASs with LabPlot2. 2d-plotting and editing of many plot objects
> in LabPlot2 is in quite good shape now. Besides implementing new smaller
> features after the first release, on of the next big steps to go could be
> the integration of a script language like python or so in order to make
> possible the workflow similar to matplotlib (e.g. [4]). Instead of python,
> or better to say, in addition to python, the integration of, say, Maxima
> would be greate. This is where the expertise of Cantor's authors would be
> very valuable.
> 
> Just saw a review request for analitza on this mailing list. I was not aware
> of this project before. Looks like there is a lot of similar work done by
> independent projects. So, a collaboration between these projects in the
> long term would be very nice and we can try to create _the_ plotting
> software for KDE that goes beyond the current possibilities of other
> similar projects in Qt/KDE-world (labplot, scidavis, kst, veusz, qtiplot,
> qcustomplot etc.)
> 
> 
> What do you think about this?
> 
> I hope, the developers of kmplot and cantor are reading this mailing list.
> If not, please tell me so I can try to get them directly :-)
> 
> 
> Best regards
> Alexander
> 
> 
> [1] http://labplot.sourceforge.net/
> [2]
> http://www.asinen.org/2013/10/labplot-2-and-the-state-of-free-data-analysis
> / [3] https://sourceforge.net/projects/labplot/
> [4] http://matplotlib.org/examples/pylab_examples/csd_demo.html


Hi,
I'm the maintainer of Cantor.
As Aleix already pointed out, the requirements for joining the KDE family are 
quite low, and I'd like to encourage you to join.
I agree that there are could be some interesting possible cooperation between 
Cantor and LabView. 
For example at the moment most(all, since I still owe Aleix the integration of 
the kalgebra-QML-item branch, sorry about that) of the plotting support in 
Cantor is static (i.e. showing an image), and due to the way most backends are 
implemented as separate processes this is hard to change. Instead we could 
offer our own interactive plotting fallback for which the backend only has to 
feed the data, which is much easier to do. What do you think? Does LabView 
offer a simple API for cases like that?

As far as using Cantor to integrate other CASes, if you have a look at 
cantor/src/lib you see that internally Cantor is designed very  modular and 
provides a library which abstracts away all the backend specifics and is 
independent of the worksheet ui. You can just send a command and get the 
results. This should give you a simple access to all the different languages 
supported. (Although for big amounts of data it might be necessary to come up 
with something faster than using stdout+parsing). If you're interested in 
trying it out, feel free to ask me anything.

best regards,
Alexander Rieder