Painting with Roassal2

The video summarizes the talk that Alexandre gave at ESUG 2014 in Cambridge two months ago, and demonstrates how the latest Roassal features are being made available in VisualWorks.

Cincom Smalltalk’s Niall Ross gave us his description of that ESUG talk. Here’s an edited version of what Niall had to say:

Alexandre opened Roassal, began looking at the classes of a system and then showed many visualisations – each one a change of display from the previous one and each one defined by a very simple code edit in the left pane of the tool.  With great speed, he formatted questions and showed the results via colours, lines and node size data. 

He opened an RTCharterBuilder (or chart builder as one might call it) where the points were classes and the X and Y axis were the number of lines of code and the number of methods.  The resulting graph had a fair amount of variation and a couple of marked outliers.  Then he graphed the overall result for two systems.  He went through a number of graphs, and added a third axis.

Roassal has a long list of layouts.  They have tools to process CSD files as well as a colour palette (based on some research on best theme combinations) and examples you can browse to understand the styles.  They have basic geographic maps, and you can use a google map background as well (another talk demoed these).

Alexandre took a tree graph and demonstrated changing it into many other displays with a 2D or 3D feel.  There is an HTML exporter.  He showed an HTML file of countries colour-coded by Smalltalk book sales.  (They have begun a book on agile visualisations.)

He also demoed a challenging non-code-analysis use: astronomy data.