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For the first time, Drupal 11.1 will natively support OOP hooks! Dating back to the very early years of Drupal, hooks provide powerful ways to modify processing flows, forms, data structures and many other parts of the system. Read more at https://www.drupal.org/node/3442349

Update 1

Great news, everyone! We now have all the necessary components to start creating our 16px icon collection. I believe that we can work on the design and creation of these icons simultaneously.

Here are some general guidelines to consider when designing the 16px icons:

• Our objective is to correlate the designs from the 24px collection to the 16px as closely as possible.
• When in doubt, create an icon that resembles or simplifies the 24px shape.
• Use 1px lines for the icons.
• Utilize the IconGrid16 component to guide your design.
• Once the icon is complete, change the icon color to the “ColorScheme-Text” color.
• To export the icon, use the Icon Jetpack plugin.

I am excited to begin working on this project and would be grateful for any designer assistance that is available. If you need help learning Figma, please don’t hesitate to reach out, and we will gladly provide our support.

If you require edit access to the Figma file for the 16px icon collection, please let me know. I believe that collaboration and teamwork will lead to the creation of an amazing set of 16px icons.

Update 2

Additionally, I wanted to let you all know that I have made some edits to the color scheme of the graphic. I would appreciate any feedback you may have on the changes, and whether I might have missed anything. Let’s work together to create a cohesive and visually stunning icon collection!

Once our colors are aligned to what we need in the system, we will update the issue recently created for this purpose. This issue is under heavy development and things are changing rapidly. Read with caution and expect updates.

https://invent.kde.org/teams/vdg/issues/-/issues/82

Colors in the design system have changed. I need to correlate the colors to the color labels below. It will look a little off for some time. However, the color variables in Figma are updated to the latest feedback. Just this graphic needs the updates as well. Only the color box is correct, not the color names

Update 3

This week we took previously-created Ocean window shadows created by Manuel de la Fuente and integrated them in the design system. The shadow variables in Figma now use Ocean-inspired shadow levels to make them more visible. This is to address feedback on shadows previously being too faint. Hopefully these make a difference.

For some reason that I don't know, the XL shadow looks fainter than the LG shadow, but it seems to be a visual bug in Figma. If you apply the XL shadow, it should appear correctly in your graphics. Update 4

Transition to PenPot is on hold for now until we have the community instance created and path manipulation updates are applied. This would impede us from recreating icons the same way we have them right now.

The typical post-DrupalCon slow week — from travel woes to taking some time off, to passing on learnings to the rest of the team. But there’s still some interesting things to note this week :)

The funny bug fixed with one line of HTML

During DrupalCon, Chris “cosmicdreams” Weber spotted a funny edge case we somehow hadn’t triggered during development: after placing a component using Experience Builder (XB), using the component props form to specify values and pressing Enter, no it actually submits the form, because that’s what forms do! But in this case, it is not meant to be submitted: the preview is updated live and saving will (eventually) happen automatically.

I investigated, and discovered the existence of <form method="dialog">, which turns out to be perfect for this use case! 1

Thanks to Chris in particular for not just reporting this, but also persevering in fixing this, including writing his very first end-to-end Cypress test! Along the way, half the team contributed either in-person at DrupalCon (Ben “bnjmnm” Mullins and Bálint “balintbrews” Kléri) or remotely (Jesse “jessebaker” Baker, Utkarsh “utkarsh_33”, Deepak “deepakkm” Mishra and I).

The bug fixed with CSS instead of JS and even net-deleting CSS

When placing components and causing the height to change, the UI became jumpy — not good.

Gaurav “gauravvvv” started working on a fix, and in reviewing it, Jesse thought of a different approach altogether … the result: a +8,-53 diffstat that deleted a bunch of JS (one entire file even) and replaced it with a pure CSS solution (fit-content) — even one CSS line less than before!

Research mode: continued

I mentioned last week that a bunch of us were in research mode.

Ted “tedbow” Bowman and Travis “traviscarden” Carden continued research on #3475672: auto-saving, drafts, and all possible ways to achieve that — with Travis overhauling that issue summary in such a magnificently structured way that has rarely been seen on drupal.org. It really helps streamline the discussion!

Similarly, Harumi “hooroomoo” Jang, Xinran “xinran” Cao, and  Alex “effulgentsia” Bronstein continued iterating on #3475363: in-UI (JS) component creation Proof-of-Concept using StackBlitz — stay tuned for a demo! :D

Missed a prior week? See all posts tagged Experience Builder.

Goal: make it possible to follow high-level progress by reading ~5 minutes/week. I hope this empowers more people to contribute when their unique skills can best be put to use!

For more detail, join the #experience-builder Slack channel. Check out the pinned items at the top!

Assorted clean-up & bugfixes

• Deepak lifted all methods out of SdcController2 into separate invokable services-as-controllers, which turned a single massive file into much more easily digestible pieces — and he was able to remove some former controller methods that had lost their usages.
• Shyam “shyam_bhatt” Bhatt, Omkar “omkar-pd” Deshpande and Jesse fixed the zoom buttons behaving erratically.
• … and a bunch more small bugs that are less interesting :)

Week 21 was September 30–October 6, 2024.

1. I love that after all these years there’s still more to discover in the HTML spec, and more affordances are available that others have thoughtfully constructed that I’ve never before needed! ↩︎

2. Originally named just fine, but definitely in need of a rename to prepare for #3454519: [META] Support component types other than SDC! ↩︎

• Drupal
• Acquia
• Experience Builder

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-42.

You Can’t Make Friends With The Rockstars

Tags: tech, capitalism, marketing, politics, criticism

People have to realize that tycoons like the ones from big tech companies can both be rich and mediocre. They were smart enough to seize opportunities at the right time but they are not exceptional. In fact, they’re even boring and spineless.

The best quote in this paper I think is: “There is nothing special about Elon Musk, Sam Altman, or Mark Zuckerberg. Accepting that requires you to also accept that the world itself is not one that rewards the remarkable, or the brilliant, or the truly incredible, but those who are able to take advantage of opportunities, which in turn leads to the horrible truth that those who often have the most opportunities are some of the most boring and privileged people alive.”

The real problem is that lots of journalists can’t come to term with the fairy tale and so fall prey to all their publicity stunts as if it had any hidden meaning. This is dangerous because of all the political power they try to seize for their own gains.

Meanwhile, “the most powerful companies enjoy a level of impunity, with their founders asked only the most superficial, softball of questions — and deflecting anything tougher by throwing out dead cats when the situation demands.”

Now you can go and read this long piece.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/rockstars/

What’s With All the Trumpy VCs?

Tags: tech, politics

It’s actually unsurprising, all those tech and crypto bros have assets in jeopardy if some regulation is applied to their industry. No wonder they’d support the one with the most libertarian agenda after the current administration which did look into antitrust cases and increased regulation (even though marginally).

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/10/silicon-valley-venture-capitalists-trump/680225/

Employees Describe an Environment of Paranoia and Fear Inside Automattic Over WordPress Chaos

Tags: tech, blog, wordpress

Wow, the atmosphere looks fairly toxic at Automattic right now. It felt like it was just about the trademark dispute but clearly the craziness is running much deeper. This is concerning for WordPress future I think.

https://www.404media.co/automattic-buyout-offer-wordpress-matt-mullenweg/

You should be using an RSS reader

Tags: tech, social-media, rss

Want to put an end to the social media platforms weight on our lives? For once there’s an individual solution which might work. This is a chance because as he rightfully points out individual solutions are generally too complicated to bring systemic change. Here this is actually doable.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/16/keep-it-really-simple-stupid/#read-receipts-are-you-kidding-me-seriously-fuck-that-noise

Using Cloudflare on your website could be blocking RSS users

Tags: tech, cloudflare, rss

Cloudflare indeed needs to do better to accommodate RSS readers. They’re not malicious bots and shouldn’t be flagged as such.

https://openrss.org/blog/using-cloudflare-on-your-website-could-be-blocking-rss-users

Stop using Brave Browser

Tags: tech, web, browser, google, privacy, politics

A good reminder that this is not the Google Chrome alternative you’re looking for. It’s the same privacy invading mindset with some bigotry on top.

https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/

The Internet Archive and its 916 billion saved web pages are back online

Tags: tech, web, archive, security

It’s a very important project, it’s really concerning that this attack went through. The service is still partly disrupted but they’re showing signs of recovery. Let’s wish them luck and good health. This archival service is essential for knowledge and history preservation on the web.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/the-internet-archive-and-its-916-billion-saved-webpages-are-back-online/

Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, knowledge, criticism, research

Now the impact seems clear and this is mostly bad news. This reduces the production of public knowledge so everyone looses. Ironically it also means less public knowledge available to train new models. At some point their only venue to fine tune their models will be user profiling which will be private… I’ve a hard time seeing how we won’t end up stuck with another surveillance apparatus providing access to models running on outdated knowledge. This will lock so many behaviors and decisions in place.

https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/3/9/pgae400/7754871#483096365

LLMs don’t do formal reasoning - and that is a HUGE problem

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, neural-networks, gpt, logic, mathematics, research

Of course I recommend reading the actual research paper. This article is a good summary of the consequences though. LLMs definitely can’t be trusted with formal reasoning including basic maths. This is a flaw in the way they are built, the bath forward is likely merging symbolic and sub-symbolic approaches.

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/llms-dont-do-formal-reasoning-and

Should you use uv’s managed Python in production?

Tags: tech, python, security, supply-chain, developer-experience

It’s tempting to use uv. It’s probably fine on the developer workstation at this point. It looks a bit early to use it in production though, it’s a bit young for that and carries questions regarding supply chain security still.

https://pythonspeed.com/articles/uv-python-production/

Use an External GPU on Raspberry Pi 5 for 4K Gaming

Tags: tech, raspberry-pi, gpu, gaming

Definitely a funny hack. Not usable for compute workloads though.

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/use-external-gpu-on-raspberry-pi-5-4k-gaming

Master Embedded Development with Rust and no_std

Tags: tech, rust, embedded

Nice article showing the steps to port Rust code to run on deeply embedded systems. It highlights the difficulties and caveats of such a task.

https://towardsdatascience.com/nine-rules-for-running-rust-on-embedded-systems-b0c247ee877e

Table lookups are efficient

Tags: tech, programming, optimization

This is too often overlooked, but table lookups can help with performance if done well.

https://lemire.me/blog/2024/10/14/table-lookups-are-efficient/

Graphics Tricks from Boomers

Tags: tech, graphics, 2d, hardware

Nice graphic tricks when the hardware was harder to work with. It’s amazing how much we could fit back then out of sheer motivation.

https://arnaud-carre.github.io/2024-09-08-4ktribute/

Why is everybody talking about sync engines?

Tags: tech, web, collaborative, crdt

Excellent introduction to sync engines and how they work. The concept is indeed coming from the gaming industry and we see it more in web applications nowadays due to the user demands for working offline and real time collaboration.

https://fika.bar/blogs/paoramen/why-is-everybody-talking-about-syncing-engines-01JAAEZTCMZA28DSESAJR3J30J

Can Logic Programming Be Liberated from Predicates and Backtracking?

Tags: tech, programming, logic, ai, prolog

Finally a path forward for logic programming? An opportunity to evolve beyond Prolog and its variants? Good food for thought.

https://www-ps.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~mh/papers/WLP24.pdf

Be Suspicious of Success

Tags: tech, reliability, tests, debugging

This is an important trait to have for a developer. If you’re content of things working without knowing why and how they work, you’re looking for a world of pain later.

https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/be-suspicious-of-success/

Boring Tech Is Stifling Improvement

Tags: tech, architecture, complexity, developer-experience, vendor-lockin

I tend to side on the “boring tech” side, but indeed this is a good reminder that what we want is finding the right balance.

https://yonkeltron.com/posts/boring-tech-is-stifling-improvement/

Cognitive load is what matters

Tags: tech, complexity, cognition, design, architecture

Definitely this. Our cognitive capacity is limited, we’d better not deplete it due to complexity before we even reach the core of the problem at hand.

https://minds.md/zakirullin/cognitive#full

Why make software?

Tags: tech, philosophy

Our craft is based on shifting sands. This brings interesting philosophical questions, like why do it at all? I think the answer proposed in this short article is spot on. It can help bring new ideas on how to be in the world. This is more important than the code itself.

https://sean.voisen.org/blog/why-make-software

Germany’s 49-euro ticket resulted in significant modal shift from road to rail

Tags: train, ecology, politics

This is definitely a good idea, I wish we had the same in France. This is too bad that they plan to raise the price, it’s going to limit the impact of the measure.

https://www.mcc-berlin.net/en/news/information/information-detail/article/49-euro-ticket-resulted-in-significant-modal-shift-from-road-to-rail.html

Bye for now!

How does a Python tool support all types of DataFrames and their various features? Could a lightweight library be used to add compatibility for newer formats like Polars or PyArrow? This week on the show, we speak with Marco Gorelli about his project, Narwhals.

[ Improve Your Python With 🐍 Python Tricks 💌 – Get a short & sweet Python Trick delivered to your inbox every couple of days. >> Click here to learn more and see examples ]

We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 15 Beta!

I saw this question on KDE forum about how to limit memory usage of a specific application in KDE, using systemd specifically. I did some research on that.

Resource control in systemd

man systemd.resource-control lists plenty of options that we can set to a cgroup. E.g., to limit the memory usage of a service, we can add:

MemoryAccounting=yes MemoryHigh=2G

under the [Service] section of its .service file.

The difference between this and ulimit is that ulimit is per process, while systemd resource control is per cgroup. I.e., the MemoryHigh is accounted to the sum of both the service process, and all sub-processes it spawns, and even detached processes, i.e., daemons.

(That's actually the main point of cgroup: a process tree that a process can't escape via double-forking / daemonizing.)

Apps as systemd services

KDE Plasma launches apps as systemd services. (See this doc and this blog for more details.)

We can find the name of the systemd service of an app like this:

$ systemd-cgls|grep konsole │ │ │ ├─app-org.kde.konsole@0d82cb37fcd64fe4a8b7cf925d86842f.service │ │ │ │ ├─35275 /usr/bin/konsole │ │ │ │ └─35471 grep --color=auto konsole

But the problem is:

1. The part of the name after @ is a random string, changes every time the app is launched.
2. The service is generated dynamically:

$ systemctl --user cat app-org.kde.konsole@0d82cb37fcd64fe4a8b7cf925d86842f.service # /run/user/1000/systemd/transient/app-org.kde.konsole@0d82cb37fcd64fe4a8b7cf925d86842f.service # This is a transient unit file, created programmatically via the systemd API. Do not edit. [Service] Type=simple ...

So if we want to limit the memory usage of Konsole, there's no persistent .service file on disk that we can edit.

Luckily, systemd allows us to create drop-in files to partially modify a service. Also, systemd considers app-org.kde.konsole@0d82cb37fcd64fe4a8b7cf925d86842f.service to be instances of a template named app-org.kde.konsole@.service. (This is how things like getty@tty3.service work.) So we can create a drop-in file named ~/.config/systemd/user/app-org.kde.konsole@.service.d/override.conf with the content:

[Service] MemoryAccounting=yes MemoryHigh=2G

and it will apply to all instances of app-org.kde.konsole@.service, even if there's no service file with that name.

(The file doesn't have to be named "override.conf". Any name with .conf works.)

Then we need to reload the systemd user manager: systemctl --user daemon-reload.

Now we can launch Konsole, and check if the memory limit works:

$ systemctl --user show 'app-org.kde.konsole@*.service'|grep MemoryHigh= EffectiveMemoryHigh=2147483648 MemoryHigh=2147483648 StartupMemoryHigh=infinity

Note: as explained above, the limit applies to the sum of Konsole and all processes it spawns. E.g., if we run kwrite in Konsole, the memory usage of kwrite will be accounted to the limit of Konsole, and the limit we set to KWrite won't apply.

Set defaults for all apps

We can put defaults in ~/.config/systemd/user/app-.service.d/override.conf, and it will match all services whose name starts with app-.

Alternatively, if we run systemd-cgls, we can see that all apps are under a node named app.slice. So we can also put defaults in ~/.config/systemd/user/app.slice.d/override.conf, and all apps will inherit the settings. However, this is different from the previous method, as user services are also under app.slice by default, so they will also inherit the settings.

Since Drupal CMS aims to enable marketers to build and launch websites quickly, Drupal CMS must offer out-of-the-box content types that are common across our target markets. 

This underlying content structure is the content model. Leading up to DrupalCon Barcelona, the Starshot leadership team highlighted the need to create an initial content strategy for Drupal CMS. Through collaboration with the Drupal CMS UX steering committee, we have developed a content model for the initial release.

These content types will be presented during site setup, and will also be available to add later on. As with much of Drupal CMS, the content types are powered by ‘recipes’, which will provide some additional functionality beyond the content types themselves, such as listing pages, menu links and even default content, where appropriate.

Content types for v1

All Drupal CMS sites will include a Basic page content type by default, to ensure users are able to create content even if they don't select any of the optional types. In addition to Basic page, the following content types will be available in the initial release:

• Event
• News article
• Blog
• Project
• Case study
• Person profile

For more detailed information about the content types and the process we followed to develop them, please see the full content strategy page.

Cristina Chumillas, the Drupal CMS UX lead, and I would like to thank everyone who contributed to developing this strategy and the accompanying documentation: Megh Plunkett, Emma Horrell, Niklas Missel, Lewis Nyman, Laurens Van Damme and Kat Shaw.

Incorporating SEO into the strategy

Since we're targeting marketers, we are making search engine optimization a top priority. Drupal CMS will provide an optional recipe for 'SEO tools'. By default, sites will have basic SEO functionality in place, such as default path alias patterns, hreflang metadata, and the ability to manage redirects.

The SEO tools recipe provides additional functionality such as meta tags, XML sitemap, and real-time SEO analysis of content. For meta tag optimization, this recipe also adds three new fields to each content type: SEO title, SEO description and SEO image. Currently these fields are in a collapsed fieldset on the node form, and are optional. If content is not provided, the meta tags will fall back to use the node title, description and featured image. 

Drupal CMS content beyond v1

Once the initial content types are available, we will work on expanding the content model in the second phase for later releases of Drupal CMS. Adding to the content model iteratively allows us to gather user feedback, make improvements, and adjust accordingly. We have some ideas for which additional content types to include later, and will have a better understanding of what content types are most desired once people begin building Drupal CMS sites.

If you have feedback on this proposed content strategy, or questions about it, please add it to this issue. We are planning to test this with users from the Drupal CMS target personas, and will provide more information when the testing is confirmed.

Being able to build our libraries and applications statically has been on the wishlist since a long time, and recently we made some progress in that direction again. Similar to the the recent Android integration improvements this is also a direct result of Akademy.

Reviving the CI

We had CI for static builds during the 5 era, but we lost quite a bit of coverage there during the transition to 6. However, what we had were only static builds of KDE libraries against a shared build of Qt. That finds some but by far not all issues related to static builds.

The new setup now actually has a static Qt6 to build against, which forces us to also sort out plugin integration correctly. While it is a bit more work to get back to the desired level of CI coverage that way, we will get to a much better result.

Static initialization and CMake

A common problem in static builds is initialization code that is run on shared library loading, as that simply doesn’t exist in static builds, and unless you know what you are doing that will usually be silently dropped from the final executable.

This has previously resulted in various workarounds, such as explicit initialization API (e.g. Q_INIT_RESOURCE), which is easy to miss. With Qt 6 having switched to CMake there’s a new option now though, so-called object libraries. Those are used as implementation details to inject the initialization code from static libraries into the final executable.

From a consumer point of view you get the same behavior as with shared libraries: you link against it and initialization just works. Behind the scenes this adds quite a bit of complexity to the build system though, which then sometimes leaks through into our build system code as well.

The probably most common case is qt6_add_resources. Qt resources need initialization code, so the target they are added to gets another dependency attached to it, an object library containing the initialization.

If that target is a library the additional object libraries need to be installed and exported via CMake as well, to make those available to consumer code (ECM support for this).

add_library(MyLib) qt6_add_resources(MyLib OUTPUT_TARGETS _out_targets ...) install(TARGETS MyLib ${_out_targets} EXPORT MyLibTargets ...)

The OUTPUT_TARGETS part is the new thing to add here (example). Another such case are custom shaders (via qt6_add_shaders), and of course QML modules (more on those below).

Installing QML modules

QML modules created with ecm_add_qml_module also produce object library targets, but since that macro works on a higher level we can handle more of that automatically (ECM MR).

ecm_add_qml_module(mymodule URI "org.kde.mymodule" ... INSTALLED_PLUGIN_TARGET KF6::mymodule) ... ecm_finalize_qml_module(mymodule EXPORT KF6MyModuleTargets)

The EXPORT argument to ecm_finalize_qml_module is the new part here. This takes care both of installing object libraries as well as exporting the QML module itself in the installed CMake configuration file. The latter is needed for statically linking QML modules into the application (see below).

When using ALIAS targets (common in KDE Frameworks, much less common outside of that) we also might need the INSTALLED_PLUGIN_TARGET argument for ecm_add_qml_module(), to make sure the module target name matches the installed alias. That’s not new, but has little practical impact outside of static linking so we have been a bit sloppy there (simple example, complex example).

Importing QML modules

Linking QML modules into the final application binary got a lot easier with Qt 6, thanks to qmlimportscanner.

add_executable(myapp) ecm_add_qml_module(myapp ...) ... if (NOT QT6_IS_SHARED_LIBS_BUILD) qt6_import_qml_plugins(myapp) endif()

That’s it, no more Q_IMPORT_PLUGIN macros or manually listing modules to link. There’s less tolerance for mistakes in the CMake and QML module metadata now though, anything incomplete or missing there will give you linker failures or module loading errors at runtime (see also ECM support for additional import search paths).

Outlook

Since Akademy almost 50 merge requests have been submitted related to this, most of which have already been integrated. With all that it’s possible now to build and run Alligator against a static Qt. Alligator was the first milestone we had picked for this during Akademy, due to being sufficiently complex to prove the viability of all this while not having dependencies that could be adding significant additional challenges on their own (such as the multimedia stack).

However, this work has been mostly done on desktop Linux, and while that allowed for rapid progress it’s the platform this is least interesting for. We yet have to reproduce this on Android, where it probably should bring the most immediate benefit, and of course this removes a big obstacle for potential support of iOS (as Qt can only be linked statically there).

The match…case statement allows us to execute different actions based on the value of an expression. In this tutorial, you will learn how to use the Python match…case with the help of examples.

In this episode, I dug into an issue with sign up. What I thought was going to be a minor issue to fix turned into a massively intense debugging session. We ended up going very deep with the django-allauth package to understand what was going on.

In this episode, I dug into an issue with sign up. What I thought was going to be a minor issue to fix turned into a massively intense debugging session. We ended up going very deep with the django-allauth package to understand what was going on.

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 281. This version includes the following changes:

[ Chris Lamb ] * Don't try and test with systemd-ukify within Debian stable. [ Jelle van der Waa ] * Add support for UKI files.

You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

The Winamp Collaborative License included restrictions that rendered Winamp nonfree

The Winamp Collaborative License included restrictions that rendered Winamp nonfree

This week was powered by the letter M and the noun "meetings".

We executed the last field-related migrations in the previous article, but we are not done with field configuration yet! Back in article 17, we used the Migrate Skip Fields module to prevent the automatic migration from importing image and YouTube fields. Today, we will use Drupal recipes to create media types and manually add media reference fields where needed.

Read more mauricio Thu, 10/17/2024 - 06:00

In this quiz, you’ll test your understanding of Single and Double Underscores in Python Names.

By working through this quiz, you’ll revisit Python naming conventions that rely on using underscores (_), how to differentiate public and non-public names by using a single leading underscore, how to use double leading underscores to leverage name mangling in Python classes, and other common uses of underscores in Python names.

[ Improve Your Python With 🐍 Python Tricks 💌 – Get a short & sweet Python Trick delivered to your inbox every couple of days. >> Click here to learn more and see examples ]

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Wishing to prove my assertion wrong on python-tk that piping python directly into tk/tcl interpreter is simple I tried to contradict myself by making a full GUI in matplotlib. Because, if you are not aware : matplotlib supports multi-target (Wx, Qt, gtk, tk, html) multi-platform widgets (Button, checkbox, text entry and so much more).

The challenge seemed pretty easy, to assemble an easy demo with simple example :

• One example on how to use text entry in matplotlib that doubles with a 2D plotter,
• and the one from matplotlib on how to draw a 3D surface with a colorbar
• and the one for projecting the contour of the function on the axis

Thus, the added value resided in letting people fill in the min/max/step information for the relevant dimensions.

Without the colorbar I would have just been slightly annoyed by the slowness of the reaction of matplotlib as a GUI, but the colorbar posed a new challenge because it would either stack for each drawing or make plt.clf/ax.cla erase too much (see this great resource on when to use cla/clf in matplotlib).

So ... I tried python-tk with matplotlib knowing all too well that you can embed natively matplotlib in tkinter interface.

And since it was working I kept it.

Here is a screenshot of the interface : WARNING this code should not be let in inventive hands (such as bored teenagers) because there is an evil eval; it requires to be in care of consenting adults.

Some highlights of the code :

• bidir python-tk requires setting the Popen PIPEs to non blocking and using select.select on the output
• matplotlib is unusable in non blocking mode : once matplotlib has the focus you need to destroy it to plot another function
• from np import * is evil, but it let you have access to all array oriented math function (sin, cos, exp, ...)

This said, we have a pretty compact code of 128 lines of code that is pretty more reactive than using matplolib's widget for a 3D ploter.