LightViz

Goal

Provide a tailored user interface for Scientific Visualization using ParaViewWeb as backend.

This project really aims to illustrate what can be done with ParaViewWeb but should not be used for production usage as it has been deprecated and is no longer supported.

Installation

$ npm install -g light-viz

After installing the package you will get one executable LightViz with the following set of options.

$ LightViz 

  Usage: LightViz [options]

  Options:

    -h, --help                   output usage information
    -V, --version                output the version number
    -p, --port [8080]            Start web server with given port
    -d, --data [directory]       Data directory to serve
    -s, --server-only            Do not open the web browser
    
    --paraview [path]            Provide the ParaView root path to use
    --offscreen                  Use flag to specify that ParaView should be used in Offscreen mode
    
    --data-analysis              Inspect data directory and compute metadata
    
    --config [path]              Provide a Lightviz config file to use
    --profile [profile]          Specify which profile from the config file to use
    
    --add-dataset [path]         Specify a dataset to add to the given data directory.  Requires the description and data flags
    --description [description]  Specify the description for the dataset being added
    --autoApply                  Optional for use with --add-dataset.  Specifies that apply/reset buttons are not needed with the dataset

Documentation

See the documentation for a getting started guide, advanced documentation, and API descriptions.

Development

To start developing light-viz, first clone the repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/Kitware/light-viz.git

To set up the dependencies for light-viz run the following. Note that this must be re-run every time the dependencies for light-viz are modified.

$ npm install

When first setting up light-viz for development, it may be helpful to have npm install a symlink to the latest version that can be executed from the command line in the folder (presumably in the path) where npm is located. To do this run:

$ npm link

Now make changes and see what happens. If you have changed the python code that runs on the paraview server side, you will have to re-run the LightViz executable that is generated by npm link. If you have changed the JavaScript code, running the following command and refreshing the page should be sufficient.

$ npm run build

Before you commit, please run:

$ npm run build:release

This creates a minified version of the light-viz JavaScript code in dist/LightViz.js which should be added to your commit.

Licensing

light-viz aka LightViz is licensed under BSD Clause 3.

Getting Involved

Fork our repository and do great things. At Kitware, we've been contributing to open-source software for 15 years and counting, and want to make light-viz useful to as many people as possible.