[Paraview] client-server

[Berk Geveci]

Hi Randy,

ParaView has a client-server mode.  However, as it is, this is
mainly to allow separation between the visualization server/cluster
and a display workstation/cluster (so that the display 
workstation/cluster does not have to belong to the same MPI group
as the visualization server). The client connects to the server
using sockets. This doesn't mean that it is easy to
write your own client. The main issue is that the server is pretty
dumb. It is essentially a parallel tcl interpreter which receives
commands from the client and executes them in parallel. There is
some additional logic in there to collect things like array bounds
but it is quite limited. The client stores all the higher level
objects and generates the necessary tcl commands to be passed to
the server. Unfortunately, a lot of the higher level objects are
very closely tied with the GUI objects (sometimes, a GUI object
contains code which manages the server commands AND the user
interface). Because of this, it is not that easy to create a smarter
server or even a middle tier that does not have any GUI code.
Currently, we have no plans to work on such a separation. I think
that it would be a nice feature but our resources are limited
and we are focused on other features.

-Berk

On Thu, 2003-04-03 at 12:13, Randy Heiland wrote:
> Howdy,
> 
> I was wondering if someone (Berk? Charles?) would care to comment on plans for
> evolving ParaView into a client-server app.  I think I've seen this mentioned
> in past posts, but maybe I was wishfully dreaming :)  If there are indeed plans
> (or if it's already underway), could you share at least the rough design?
> 
> thanks,
> --Randy
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