Avogadro Gets Some Sweet POV-Ray Goodness
Wednesday, July 18. 2007
It has been a while since I last posted about progress with Avogadro. I have been doing a lot of under the hood improvements which has been really frustrating at times and hard to blog about. Hey I just spent all day refactoring the Painter base class and everything still works the same as it did before! At last I have some real output and have just committed the code to the repository.
The above image is one of the first I have produced and ray traced in POV-Ray. The abstracted painter stuff seems to be working really well and the engines no longer care whether they are painting onto an OpenGL context or to a file with POV-Ray objects in it. I think this is one of the most exciting aspects of the work I have been doing - the painting code has been somewhat abstracted away from the engines allowing for multiple painter devices.
I haven't just been coding though. I had a lot to think about after aKademy and have been reading a great deal about Qt and API design. I have also been reading the book that Google sent me about producing open source software. One suggestion I really like and I think most projects should be using is of code review, where each commit is reviewed by other members of the project. At times I think I would find it tough to review the code of other project members but I can see how it can really improve the quality of the code and help us see what other people are doing in the project.
I need to run as it is my nephews birthday today and I am expected. Hope you like the image. The POV-Ray export is extremely rough right now and needs a lot of things to be done before I would consider it ready for prime time. The philosophy of maintaining minimal local revisions also appeals to me though and so I am trying to stick to that too. I hope to be making much nicer images soon.
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Before everything hit me with the wedding and move, I had hoped to get initial SWIG wrappers for Avogadro and a simple scripting extension. The latter would make it extremely easy to handle computational modeling tasks like submitting a job to Gaussian or GAMESS or whatever, and then re-reading any output file.
Of course if Marcus or Donald or someone else implements it first, so much the better. I'm quite sure we can have good access from Ruby, Python, and Perl, much like Open Babel -- it might just not be until September at this rate.
As far as code review, it's definitely a good idea, although in practice I find adding quality comments, internal documentation, and unit tests more useful. The challenge is often not just the code review, but being able to come back to your own (or other) code weeks or months later and knowing quickly what it's supposed to do.
I certainly agree that quality code comments, internal documentation and unit tests are also useful. I attended a talk on the unit test framework available to Qt and KDE applications and saw how powerful it could be.