Design of ScalaVis

I spent some time this weekend working on the design of ScalaVis. The goals of the project are to include all the capabilities currently in SwiftVis in the GUI and also enable scripting or interactive usage with the REPL. The SwiftVis design goals of a free, platform independent data analysis/exploration/plotting package with decent speed pointed nicely to Java. However, Java doesn't include an REPL or real scripting ability. Scala does. While Scala can call Java code seamlessly, it isn't possible to easily retrofit SwiftVis into scripting because so many of the settings are completely encapsulated and can only be accessed through the GUI.

The design I came up with leverages the functional nature of Scala and data-flow programming. There is a concept of Elements which are basically functional data transformers. You can script or work interactively with Elements. On top of that sits Builders. As the name implies, Builders are supposed to build elements. They will go into the GUI and have graphical representations and GUI components that enable altering settings.

I have also been working on making the GUI construction aspect easier. The Scala Swing library helps with this to a certain extent. However, I am trying to push it further so that there are more reusable pieces and people have to create fewer components on their own.