Mayavi sprint July 2008: a summary

The first Mayavi sprint was held between 2nd to 9th July at Enthought's offices in Austin Texas. It was a great success in my opinion. A large amount of work was done. Gaël Varoquaux and I were heading the sprint team. Several Enthought employees participated as did many of the interns. Jarrod Millman was also at the office at this time and it was great having him around as well. Overall it was great fun and I personally had a wonderful time.

Here is a picture of part of the sprint room at the Enthought office on day one (2nd July).

Part of the room on 8th.


We had identified various things to do and these are all put up on the Mayavi sprint wiki page. I'll summarize these in short below in no particular order (more details on the wiki page):

• Generating the menu items in Envisage involved a ton of boilerplate code. In addition we wanted to be able to generate pure TraitsUI menus when a user right clicked on a node on the mayavi engine tree view. This has been implemented so we have automatically generated envisage and traits UI menus for all the sources, filters and modules.
  
• Mayavi now supports context sensitive menus. Suppose for example you have loaded a file that contains unstructured grid data. In this case the mayavi menus for say a GridPlane module will be greyed out since it is not possible to use that module for unstructured grid data.
• The file->load data menu has been cleaned up. There is only one "Open file" entry for all supported mayavi datasets. This is also true for the command line option. One may load any file using simply

  mayavi2 -d file.ext

  where the file extension ext is any supported data file extension (vtk, wrl, 3ds, jpeg, png etc.)
• Gaël led a group (Field C, Ilan S and Chris C) which built a data visualization wizard that makes it easy for a user to create a TVTK dataset given numpy arrays. The dialog looks really cool and is not finished yet but getting there real fast.

• Judah, Vibha and Eric worked very hard on improving the UI of several of the dialogs. They made modifications so it is easier to customize views and made several of the views much nicer.
• Robert Kern ported the text editor plugin and the logger plugin to Envisage3. The text editor plugin is now used in mayavi.
  
• Evan P fixed a few bugs with the scrollbars on Traits UI's.
• Chris G fixed many packaging issues. He also removed the unnecessary multiple copies of the sphinx generated docs that were being checked in.
• Jeff W and Patrick helped write scripts to generate the sphinx docs and have the mayavi docs show up on the web.
• Ilan S. helped find several bugs and helped both Gaël and me in various areas.
• Dave Peterson started some work on automatic scripting of mayavi based on recording UI actions but there wasn't enough time for this to get done considering Dave's many other responsibilities.
• Dave Peterson pushed for an ETS-2.8.0 release during the sprint.
  
• Dave Morrill helped fix several traits bugs.

My apologies if I missed someone in the list of contributors above. As you can see, a huge number of things got done. It was great fun. Enthought hospitality was, as always, outstanding.

Gaël and I thank all those who participated! Our thanks to Enthought who funded it and helped make it a success.

Given the success with our first sprint, we plan to hold a two day sprint at SciPy 2008. Please do join us!

Gaël and I are also teaching a two hour tutorial this year at SciPy 2008. Hurry, 11th is the last day for early registration!