Phil Weinstein / Accomplishments -- September 2012 (edit 10-3-2012)

General Development Accomplishments

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[I.A.2] Sponsored Projects / RiverWare / Bug Fixes
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The following RiverWare bugs were addressed:

 
Maintenance Accomplishments

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[I.A.4] Sponsored Projects / RiverWare / Software Maintenance
   (A) Qt and Qwt Version Upgrade
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The newest available versions of the Qt4 and Qwt (plotting) libraries were downloaded, built and compiled and tested with RiverWare. This work was started in August; completion was delayed until September to wait for the release of the next Qt 4.8 patch release. RiverWare is now built with these new versions:

We included the optional "WebKit" component in our Qt4 build. This is a distinct open source product providing advanced HTML and related web rendering and interactive technologies. WebKit is the core of the Apple Safari and Google Chrome web browsers. Qt 4.8.3 includes the Qt port of WebKit version 2.2.3.

Initial testing with RiverWare revealed only minor problems to be worked out. A graphical problem with the Simulation Object Palette -- when dragging an object icon onto the workspace -- was resolved by porting the palette dialog from Qt3 to Qt4.

The process of building Qt and Qwt from source code on Windows and deploying these libraries in the RiverWare build is described in this new document:

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[I.A.4] Sponsored Projects / RiverWare / Software Maintenance
   (B) Qt3 to Qt4 Port
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The following dialogs containing complex Qt3 widgets (generally lists, treeviews and tables) were ported to Qt4:

  1. Object Account Summary Configuration "Save" dialog -- (Q3ListBox)
  2. Edit Row/Column Labels Dialog (for TableSlots and AggSeriesSlots) -- (Q3Table)
  3. RPL Block Selector -- (Q3ListView)
  4. RPL Editor (blocks, functions, etc) -- (Q3ScrollView)
  5. Diagnostics Configuration Dialog: Category tree view and object, account and slot lists -- (Q3ListViews).
  6. Open Statistical Table Slot Dialog -- (Q3Table)
  7. Display Group Editor -- (Q3ListView)
  8. General Selector Dialog (aka GUS, "Grand Unified Selector") -- (Q3ListView)
  9. Sim Object Palette -- (Q3StoredDrag)

This represented about 35% of RiverWare dialogs still containing Qt3 widgets. Beyond Qt3 "widget" porting work, we still need to recode use of all Qt3 "methods" throughout the RiverWare GUI libraries.

Generally, only minor enhancements were implemented in the course of this Qt4 porting work. Several modules have run-time performance enhancements. Functional enhancements (for the numbered items listed above) include:

(3) The RPL Block Selector's partially implemented supported for also selecting RPL Functions was made more complete, including showing display columns with information specific to RPL Functions.

(4) Line "wrapping" within the RPL Editor was improved. In some cases, with the Qt3 implementation, some of the displayed RPL code had been obscured on the right side.

(5) The Account and Slot list panels of the Diagnostics Configuration Dialog now show accounts and slots with "hybrid" type icons. These are composed of two or three individual icons including icons for the type of the containing object and account.

(6) The Open Statistical Table Slot Dialog now shows an "Evaluate" icon button -- similar to the open slot dialog for the new Annual Aggregation Series Slot.

(8) The General Selector Dialog has significant performance improvements (e.g. when handling a selection among several thousand slots) and better automatic layout adjustments.

The progress of this phase of Qt4 porting work is documented on this webpage:

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