In our grand vision of making Roassal the best visualizing engine of the Universe (we also know to be modest time to time, but not today :-),
Yes please ...
I am curious:
- what are in your opion the biggest gaps to close.
- what are the short, mid and long term goals.
There are difficult questions. I think (but maybe I am wrong), that the web will play a very important role. Being able to have interactive visualization on the web is highly important. Even for Pharoers: many are embedding Roassal-made visualizations in seaside applications. In addition of using a cool programming environment, there is a big advantage of using Roassal over other systems (D3, RaphaelJS, …): - The visualization is made in Pharo and JavaScript HTML5 code is generated. So, in principle, this should be more memory efficient than using a JavaScript library. We have not made any benchmarks for this so far. But we envision Roassal-made visualization to be mobile-over-poor-internet-connection friendly.
Our short term goals is: - continuing to fix bugs and stabilizing the system. We will avoid having big-bang or major feature implementation. Stabilizing is important.
Our mid-term goal is: - publishing AgileVisualization.com as a real book
Our long term goal is: - offering a rock-solid platform for data visualization - generating super-compact JS/HTML5 code - be better than competitor libraries in terms of speed and memory consumption when run in a web browser.
Ever thought of a "feature-based" bountie system to get money?
The email we have sent recently to the ESUG mailing list goes in that direction. It is important for us that users show their support. This helps keeping the moral high and making sure we have the financial support to continue developing Roassal.
I am personally fully committed to Roassal. This means that my employer (the University of Chile) cannot make me change the focus of my research or work. So I am working on Roassal, and will continue to do so for quite some time. I am lucky to be surrounded by a wonderful and highly competent team of software engineers. Roassal will have a long life! :-)
Cheers, Alexandre