Re: graphics future

[Shai Ayal]

> John W. Eaton wrote:
> > Also, I simply don't have the cycles to be the maintainer of the
> > graphics code.  I took my best shot at the property database code for
> > 2.9.10.  If people think that is a reasonable design and someone would
> > like to maintain and extend it, then OK.  If not, then let's agree on
> > something else that is maintainable, extensible, and (perhaps most
> > importantly) compatible.

While I agree that compatibility is important, and what we don't make
compatible today will come back at us in the form of bug reports and
help requests, I think that maybe we should not strive, at this point
in time, to be compatible with the latest feature set of matlab.
Back in 2000 when I used matlab extensively for producing graphs for
scientific papers (I think it was version 6, the first version with th
java ide), the graphics objects included just the base objects (line,
patch, surface, text + 3D and maybe some more). The group and
annotation objects were not invented yet. I found that that feature
set was enough to produce very nice graphs and allowed me to make them
look exactly as I wanted.

I see graphics objects as a nice way to tweak the "default" graphs
(i.e changing the line width in a line plot) and as a way to invent
new ways to show the data, in a sense inventing a new graph type.
While group objects make these a LITTLE bit more convenient, I fail to
see what qualitative added value they have. Maybe someone here wth
more experiance can point out the advantage.
OTOH, from the discussion here in the last few days, they are very
hard to implement in a compatible way and it seems to me the API is
not even fully documented. This means that someone like me cannot even
help here since I don't have any access to matlab.

To quote Dan:
> That's a lot of work no matter what route one goes;
> probably full-time for two or three people for a year maybe.  Graphics is fun in
> some ways, but not the livelihood of most list listeners.

My suggestion -- let's defer the support of the group and annotation
objects to a later date. Lets implement the basic objects + high level
graphs.

Just my 0.08 NIS (~$0.02)
Shai