Commentary on View architecture for Custom Views

ParaView 3's view/representation and strategy architecture is a great improvement over ParaView 2's render module architecture. But there is room for improvement, especially regarding the creation of custom views. The following describes what the weaknesses of the current architecture are and how some existing custom views are implemented. The purpose of this page is to tabulating this information so that our next design may be even stronger.

Weaknesses

architecture complex, three independent class hierarchies (proxy definition, proxy, vtk)

architecture not well documented

hard to augment what is there without entirely replacing

parallel rendering, many cases many classes, hard to reuse code

configuration independence hard to replicate

Example Custom Views

Manta:

 change to XML parsing to do targetted replacement of parent proxy's subproxies/properties from 
   override attribute

 client side classes (GLRenderer) different from server (MantaRenderer)

 hacked IceT out to do composite and not use GL

Static Streaming Applications Views:

 replacing behavior high up the ViewProxy class hierarchy without breaking them

 contained real view is controlled by parent view

 written before xml override, so it used shared properties and dynamic swap at instantaion time

Others?: