ImageFlow technical blog

I'm busy with my regular courses and some not-study related project, so I haven't programmed on Imageflow alot.
I did some clean up and refactoring, removing some of the old ballast, that survived through the versions. I added some small things, but mostly, I'm on feature-freeze right now. I want to clean and fix the functions I have and add the strongly required checks and controll mechanism. This includes all graph utilities to check the connections, validity, verfy input and outputs types, catch loops and bugs. My scrapbook is doing a good job helping me to note idea I have, but I haven't programmed everything yet. Especially the loops give me headaches. I set up a small testframework in JUnit to test my models and the functionality. I'm up to 35 tests now and it's really handy.

One of the features that will get some intention later is the saving and loading of flows. There is already some XML-representation I'm going to use, but alot of work is yet to to.

As Willy Wonka used to say, go on go on, there is so much time and so little to see.

For the past few weeks, I always run around with a scrapbook. While, waiting I take it out and scribble strange stuff. Mostly related to this project. Sometimes, I just have no idea, other times, new ideas, arising problems or solutions just flyby and I note them down. Yesterday was very productive.

Yesterday I met with my professor who supervises my Bachelor-project. I presented my current state and we added some basic Properties-editing function, which works quite well actually. Basically we took the GenericDialogs, that ImageJ offers and used them to create the UnitElements Properties-Window. Much simpler than I actually thought.

Apart from that, I continued some work on the algorithms. The algorithm uses SelectionSort. Not the most efficient, but fast enough here. I'm working to find ways, to run Unit-Checks as well, so for example, that not-connected Units are discarded as soon as possible, thereby cleaning the UnitList.

Some small things on the GUI, the Popup-Menu is reworked. I excluded all Actions in actual Action-Classes. The clipboard functions work nicely, except for the Cut. If a Unit is cut and pasted back in, the Unit's MacroElement, the part which holds the ImageJ-syntax is null. Strange thing, I haven't yet figured out while.
Apart from that, I build some basic menus.

One thing missing in the whole application are the proper MVC-handlers. Changes in the model don't call back to the UI at the moment. So to update the GraphPanel you have to click or repaint manually. Of course this isn't nice yet. So one of the next tasks will be to incorporate some proper application-structure. I've been looking for Desktop-Application-Frameworks for Java, but apart from Jazz, which only supports Java6, while I work in Java5, I found nothing. So I'm back own my own and trying to find some nice structure.

This week is the official ImageJ Conference in Luxembourg, I won't be attending, but there will be a lecture about the project with the presentation of this programm.

During the last few days many new features arrived. Nodes can be added via a popup-menü. Existing nodes can be copied. Finally you can turn Nodes into DisplayUnits in the GUI. DisplayUnits show their results, while normal units just pass the result to the next unit. I'm just wondering, if it makes sense to add a bypass-function, although this can be done easily in the graph anyway.

Node deletion will be up next. One major task, that I haven't touched yet is the interface for changing the parameters of a unit. So far those can't changed. I know VisualAp has something, but I haven't checked if I can use it.