Re: GUI

[Ben Pfaff]

John Darrington <address@hidden> writes:

> Phase 3:  Add the ability perform transformations on the data (eg. SORT,
>       AGGREGATE etc).  I suggest the best way to do this is to have
>       the GUI generate a syntax string eg "SORT CASES BY /x" and pass
>       this request to an external daemon, similar to the way Ben
>       suggested earlier.  The exact details of this protocol will have
>       to be worked out --- eg it'll be necessary to specify a socket
>       or pipe to stream the casefile from the gui to the backend, and
>       vice-versa.

Maybe we should specify some protocol that's easier to emit and
parse than the syntax.  I dunno.  I guess we'll see how it goes
when we get there.

> Phase 4:  Add procedures (eg EXAMINE, T-TEST, REGRESSION).  This will
>       work much the same way as Phase 3.  The new issue will be how to
>       display the output.  One way will be to use our existing output
>       mechanism and to add a GDK driver to it.  This will however will 
>       not allow for  interaction with the "Pivot Tables" the way that
>       spss does.  Other options exist, which I've not really thought
>       about much, and it's probably more in Ben's area of expertise.

I have a bit of a plan here.  We'll see how it works out.  The
idea is that procedures emit their output in a neutral,
machine-readable format (possibly HDF5 or XML) and then readers
can convert it into whatever format they like (plain text,
PostScript, etc.) or display it as pivot tables or whatever.
There's a huge, huge stack of details to work out of course.
-- 
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