Improving the Desktop Front End #506
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Thanks for sharing the experience! I guess it would be nice if we have something like how Matlab runs where a double-click brings up everything. But, this is almost impossible within a container environment as a GUI interface will need access and be compatible with the host OS, so it will be very easy to break even if we have something hacked together. Within the container, I guess the only thing doable is to switch to a pure command line interface, where the frontend will be just the Python prompt. Note that I prefers the basic Python over iPython for this because the add features of iPython might just be another layer of complexity for a beginner. If some advanced features are needed, it is probably a good idea to switch to Jupyter anyway. Now, if we get rid of the container, all other options are then possible. For IDE integration, I don't know much about that, but I can see we either tie to a specific one or trying to be compatible with any IDEs. I can see obvious downsides of each. The other option is to make a binary release of MsPASS (like an app such as Matlab), and we need to make it compatible with Windows, Mac OS and Linux. Not sure how difficult that would be, but we need to learn more about it as this is something I have no experience with before. With all these said, the problem here is exactly why I pushed for the science gateway. Ideally, users can just go to the URL and run things without any of the setup process. Still, with the backend being HPC, it is still a bit complicated even with a gateway. The alternative is to use the cloud. There are services running on the cloud that is similar to what science gateway is. Some well-known ones are Binder and JupyterHub, but I think they all come with a cost for serious users. We can given them a try I guess. |
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Yesterday I held an introductory session on MsPASS to a group of first-year graduate students. The session reinforced something I had been thinking for some time. In a nutshell, our front-end for interactive use with MsPASS is awful and unquestionably an excessive energy barrier for 99% of potential users.
Why?
What do we need?
Let me expand point 2 above as an initial set of possible functional specifications for what this interface should do. I suggest we use this forum in combination with our weekly meetings to turn this into a design document.
Desktop Front-end functional specifications
Need a simple one line launcher that should normally just work.
Needs multiple, configurable options for the front end
Possible solutions
Group, please contribute to this discussion and we should add it to the agenda for our weekly meetings until this problem is solved. It is a fundamental usage barrier for MsPASS.
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