24 September 2014 meeting

Attendees

TomG, Greg, Eric, Conrad

Agenda

Discussion about Chimera2 Tool and Session APIs.

Action Items

None

Results

Agreed to Conrad's ToolShed/ToolFactory/Tool API after some tweaks. ToolShed is used to access list of all possible tools or all installed tools. ToolFactories contain metadata about tools for use in tool menus, model panel, and command line. ToolFactories can also be used to create Tool instances. Tools offer access to the tool functionality and have methods for serializing and deserializing tool data to/from sessions and scenes.

Greg discussed the separation between Session and Application objects. It was agreed that it would be nice if logging functionality was accessible outside of session objects so that such objects would not have to be passed through to every function that might want to log information or errors. This led into a long discussion of the costs and benefits of supporting multiple sessions in the same Chimera 2 process. No conclusion was reached and it was agreed to table the discussion until Monday's meeting with the full group, to garner additional input and possibly see if someone had a compelling use case that required multiple separate sessions.

Greg suggested that tools might simply put attributes into sessions and there would be a mechanism to prevent overwrites, but Conrad wanted to see more discipline in session attributes names, e.g. volume_data rather than mav391, the idea being would know to distribute their data into these well-known names so that other tools could find them if needed. There would be some place for tools to put miscellaneous tool data.