Development
The final portion of the tutorial focused on development of VisIt, specifically in creating plugins. They covered the basic usage of their plugin development wizards, xmledit and xml2plugin . They created, live, a new datasource plugin to load a simple text file containing X & Y coordinates , and visualized it. Then they created a simply X-Scaling operator plugin, and demonstrated it. Both showed the underlying VTK foundation, creating and manipulating vtkDataSet objects, and showed the extreme effort they’ve put into making it simple and straightforward to dive right into development.
Future Development
During the tutorial they dropped several hints about things in the works for VisIt 2.0. You can see the entire “wishlist” on the Wiki, but they had a few concrete examples:
- Support for a full Python Scripting interface on the backend
- 2-D transfer functions for colormaps
- Replacing/Supplementing the internal Expression Language with Python
Conclusion
It was a great tutorial. I haven’t taken a good long in-depth look at VisIt in about two years, but after this I’ve decided I’m going to. The functionality and power is simply too big to ignore. The work they’ve put into support for massively parallel systems and HPC configurations is astounding, and combined with the impressive catalog of data analysis tools it really looks more “useful” than their competitors like ParaView and EnSight.
If you were there, What did you think? Did I leave anything out?
