Early ideas for visualizer and GUI

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Ben Stabler edited this page Feb 15, 2017 · 1 revision

Early ideas for visualizer and GUI

Requirements / Questions

Should the GUI/Visualizer be one tool? Hopefully yes.
Should the GUI/Visualizer be a desktop application, a client-side web application, or a server-based web application? Hopefully a client-side web application since this means limited back-end administration
- The GUI/Visualizer should get all its data from the VD HDF5 datastore
Example GUI/Visualizer options to review and discuss:
- Client-side JavaScript such as ABMVIZ and RPAT Dashboard
  - These are served by GitHub and read CSV files for data
  - Potential issue with reading VE's HDF5 datastore since HDF5 libraries are native to the OS; this library may solve this problem
- Client-side flexdashboard R package such as the PART model dashboard
  - Is run at the end of a model run; write R code that gets converted to HTML/JavaScript; see here for more details
  - Maybe not sufficient technology for a GUI as well; can also make use of R shiny, see below.
- Server- and/or desktop-based such as the FSDM GUI which uses R shiny and the existing RPAT GUI which uses CherryPy
  - These are not very lightweight since they require running a web server, installing R, RStudio, Python, and dependent libraries, which often requires user admin rights.
What's our vision for the VE GUI/Visualizer?
- The scope says transfer the existing RPAT GUI (CherryPy) but that probably isn't the best choice for the long term future of VisionEval
- I suggest we look into client-side web applications like R flexdashboard