[Paraview] ParaViewWeb & TomCat

[Sebastien Jourdain]

Hi Chris,

are you on Mac ? Because, I kind of remember an issue with
activemq-cpp on Mac. You will need to checkout their source to get rid
off the segfault at runtime...

Seb

On Sat, Dec 3, 2011 at 6:20 PM, Sebastien Jourdain
<sebastien.jourdain at kitware.com> wrote:
> Hi Chris,
>
> I respond directly in your mail
>
>> As a first cut, I think it would be fine to have the engines write out their data.  Andy can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think we could use the co-processing to write just the subset of geometry and field data that we want to display in the notebook. If I understand correctly, with that approach we could  then just focus on starting PWServer, reading in the data files, and setting up the communication between tornado and tomcat.
>
> With that cut, you can definitely use ParaViewWeb as is and let a
> JavaScript code start the PWServer for you. The only thing that you
> have to provide is the path to that data file... And yes, you can do
> from the co-processing dump the stripped version of the data to the
> disk.
>
>> For future reference, when we want to move beyond dumping the data, here is how each engine is connected to paraview: A module called vtkViewers has been imported by each python engine and executed the following code:
>>
>> from paraview import servermanager
>> global globalController, newGlobalController
>> paraview.options.batch = True
>> paraview.options.symmetric = True
>> pm = servermanager.vtkProcessModule.GetProcessModule()
>> globalController = pm.GetGlobalController()
>> ...
>>
>> In addition to this bit, each engine has attached it's mesh and field data arrays to the proper VTK containers and set up a parallel visualization pipeline.  It can potentially also read in a co-processing script to set up additional visualization.  I was hoping that this setup would eventually allow us to start a PWServer and attach it to the pvserver which is directly connected to the VTK objects in memory on each engines.
>
> This is kind of possible by starting pvserver in collaborative mode
> and have the PWSever connecting to that running pvserver in the same
> time as your python engine.
>
>>> - On the ParaViewWeb side (tomcat web app) you will have to patch the
>>> code so it won't prevent you to connect to a process that was not
>>> started by itself. (I can help you with that, it should be pretty
>>> simple)
>>
>> Thanks, that would be very helpful.
>
> This will only be needed if you need to start PWServer from python,
> but if you dump the data somewhere you won't need it at all.
>
>> I'll look into that. I'm going to visit the IPython notebook developers next week and can get some help on working with tornado. I think it will help if I can get the standard ParaViewWeb setup working.
>
> Sure just let me know if you are running into issues...
>
>>> PS: For your later mail did you get the source form here
>>> (http://paraview.org/ParaViewWeb.git) which is not github ?
>>
>> Yes, sorry, I got it from paraview.org.
>
> ok, good I was scared that you pick an old version on the web before
> we get our git repo setup...
>
>> Somewhere on the list somebody mentioned upgrading to activemq 3.4 so I did too. I should only need activemq cpp libs, paraview, and PW server to successfully build and make tests, right?
>
> Yes
>
> Normally with the latest version in the repository you should use the
> current (latest) stable version of activemq-cpp without any issue.
> Maybe the documentation is slightly off regarding that part.
> Then the make test is not really needed in fact, you should just make
> sure that when you start PWServer it is not segfaulting... Other than
> that you should setup the WORKING_DIR and the TOMCAT_HOME to allow the
> deploy of the application. Once it's done, just do "make; make
> deploy", then make sure activemq is started and start tomcat.
>
> Look at the tomcat log once you connect to any sample ParaViewWeb
> application to make sure you don;t get any exception. On top of that
> if it is not working, double check the logs that are in the
> WORKING_DIR/logs. And come back to the paraviewweb mailing list...
>
> When you stop tomcat, make sure it properly did before restarting it.
> (ps aux | grep java | grep tomcat)
>
> Seb