Saturday, February 5, 2011

ctioga superseded by ctioga2

First, some historical details: some 6 years ago, I discovered Ruby together with Tioga, a great library for producing plots. That immediately resulted in my first Ruby program, ctioga. But as years passed and more features were forced into ctioga, I was compelled to see my initial design mistakes, and think about a complete rewrite.

This is where ctioga2 was born, some time at the beginning of 2009. I completely stopped using the old ctioga a few month after starting to work on ctioga2, but it took ages before I finally came up with a decent enough documentation to release and announce publicly. But now, it's done, and the first public release of ctioga2 is out, still fresh !

Here are a few highlights of the differences:

  • For me, it's day and night: adding new commands is painless: I only need to create an object with the appropriate code; registering is done automatically.
  • Now, command-line switches also accept options looking like this /option value that allow many small tweaks I had never had the courage to write for the old ctioga as it was way too painful to add new commands there.
  • ctioga2 can be driven both from command-line and using command files, in the style of gnuplot, which is the reason why I call it polymorphic.
  • More importantly, I finally had the possibility (and more or less compelling reasons, to be found in a paper currently in press) to implement 3D data displays in ctioga2, in the form of color maps (that's what is shown here).
  • There are still a few things that could be done by ctioga and that miss from ctioga2, such as histograms. When I have some time and/or motivation...

In any case, you can make yourself an opinion of ctioga2 by looking at the galleries.

Enjoy !

1 comment:

Kroz Oblake said...

hurrey! love ctioga, I am using it all the time, she is fast and elegant ...and yes, FAST.
ctioga2 has to be even better with polymorphic!
keep up the good work!

Lidija