Brainfold On Python, game development and everything

Information visualization

First, an update on the last post: I sent mail to the developer of generateDS, and he has located the problem and is looking into it. That was quick, nice. As for parsing C, I took a look at a couple of tools, including GCC-XML, but I couldn't find anything I could readily use. So I'm still counting on Pyparsing or PLY to do the job. I realized Pyglet is using PLY, maybe I'll look into that for insight.

The last few days I've been spending my programming effort on a university project. I'm on a course called "Information visualization project work", where we're supposed to design and implement a prototype of an information visualization (infovis) application. I already took the infovis introduction course and the topic seems quite interesting, especially since it's related to user interfaces which I'm very interested in. Infovis is visualization of abstract data, as opposed to scientific visualization, which is about visualizing concrete data such as air flow over a wing, or the structural integrity of a bridge. Common applications include maps (although the underlying map might visualize concrete landscape, it's almost always overlaid with abstract data such as routes) stock rates and weather charts.

We had three topics to choose from, and our group chose visualization of research article citations. Since there don't seem to be any suitable visualization libraries for Python, and I don't really like the GUI libraries for Python either, and I hate Java, and I don't know Flash, we chose to do the prototype in C#. It's much nicer to work with than Java, and I'm at least somewhat familiar with both the language and the .NET API. Granted, I could have tried to use IronPython, but I have no experience at all in it, so I decided not to take the risk of trying to learn it for this short project. We're using a visualization library called Piccolo, which at least initially seems quite nice. It's almost trivial to set up too, though the API and especially documentation is a bit confusing. Unfortunately the free version isn't really maintained or updated anymore. It would be nice if someone did something similar for Python... or maybe a library like that exists, but I just couldn't find one.