[Paraview] Comparison of Visit and ParaView development

[Sven Kramer]

Dear ParaView programmers,
I would like to have some opinions on the suitability of either ParaView or
Visit for large scalable visualization applications. When I had the first
contact to visualization more than 5 years ago, Visit was not quite
scalable and ParaView seemed the only open source alternative.
Now I am trying to get into some serious developments, and although most
papers in the field still cite ParaView as their development framework,
there seems to be no active developers community except for two or three
kitware employees. Questions on this list are at the most basic level, and
nobody seems to be able to answer, who isn't working for kitware.
My impression is that ParaView has grown so complicated over the years that
it is no longer usable as a framework for parallel visualization
development. Only the ParaView application itself is still frequently used.
On the other hand, Visit seems to have overtaken ParaView in all aspects.
Most important is the high quality documentation and very active community,
scalability is now as good as ParaView, and collaborative web visualization
is coming rapidly.

What is your opinion? Are there any points, where ParaView is clearly
advantageous over Visit? Or is it used by most people only out of
convenience, because they have always worked with ParaView?
Given the horribly out of date books on ParaView and parallel VTK
development, web documentation mixing three major versions without stating
which version is referred to, and the dead development discussions I don't
see any possibility of learning ParaView programming today. Which material
do you use for tutorials and documentation?

Thank you
Sven
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