eboasson
commented
3 months ago The beginnings of a GUI tool for Cyclone! 🥳 I only tried it on macOS, but I assume it also works on Linux and Windows. I shouldn't assume such things, but for now that'll do.
There are very few comments I have on the details, there are really just three:
- I'd try using a waitset instead of sleeping in the observer thread reading the built-in topics
- I'd reconsider using a bool argument to indicate whether something is a reader or a writer
- I'd consistently use "reader" and "writer" instead of "subscriber" and "publisher". There is nothing wrong with the latter except in the universe of DDS, and it matters because this a tool for DDS.
My Qt skills are non-existent and my python ones are insufficient to comment on the implementation details, other than that it looks well-organised and that I do understand it when I read it. So I do feel comfortable that in a pinch I can fix it, or (time permitting) add to it. That's all good.
The bits where I have my doubts are directly related to the GUI, which doesn't really matter that much at this stage. What I would like is to be able to also look at processes and machines — there are various views for structuring the system, after all. (What I would really like is also to draw a picture that immediately shows bandwidth used, but that data is not easily available today.) When looking at the readers/writers, I think the choice of a tooltip doesn't work so well; a (collapsible) "details" pane would probably work better (and would perhaps allow linking things so you can click through the system). Oh well, there are a thousand-and-one additional things one can wish for in a tool.
For the things mentioned, I can see how you can add that in the structure although I don't have a good sense of how much work it would be to replace the tooltips by a pane, or to have multiple views of the system at hand. I suspect it gets a bit verbose in maintaining the tree view, but that may well be perfectly normal for this type of application. (When did I last write a GUI application? 1998 or so? That was with XForms on X11 ... 🧑🦳)
As for the name, "Insight" sounds vaguely familiar — I think my employer once had a tool with that name, but that can't be an issue when this is prefixed with "Cyclone DDS". It may be a bit dull but I can't think of something catchier — probe, visualise, inspect, discover, analyze, x-ray, monitor, observe ... all equally dull ...
Finally, I am wondering if it makes the most sense to have this inside the python binding's repository. It would probably be nicer to have a separate repository for it. That's easy enough to arrange (but then changing its name becomes harder).
Do let me know what you think of my 3 minor review comments 🙂
trittsv
Initial commit for the graphical tool
CycloneDDS Insightto visualize the current DDS system. Python because in later features like dynamically add and test IDL-Files the app does not have to be recompiled. It can be shipped as one app for everyone. I am willing to provide future bug fixes and support for this tool.@eboasson It is ready for review, i will fix all of your notes, feel free to comment 😃 If you prefer a different name for this tool then tell me and i will adjust.
Initial features:
... and even more feature are coming this year.
Example image (1/2):
Example image with qos (2/2)