[kepler-dev] [Bug 3948] - Configuration systems should be merged

[bugzilla-daemon at ecoinformatics.org]

http://bugzilla.ecoinformatics.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3948





------- Comment #2 from cxh at eecs.berkeley.edu  2009-04-20 17:19 -------
Last week, I spoke with Edward about runtime configuration and he 
believes that it would be fairly easy to create an editor to develop
configurations.  

For example, if you run
cd $PTII
$PTII/bin/vergil ptolemy/configs/full/configuration.xml

Then you can view the configuration.  Using Graph -> Automatic layout
helps clean it up.  However, currently, changes are not preserved
by saving.  If we provide the user with an environment to create the
configuration, then the question of xml or not xml becomes moot.

We have funding to work on configurations, in particular to provide
an easy way for users to create custom configurations.

A few issues:
- There are plenty of things to configure: 
    - menus
    - the right hand actor pane
- A large problem seems to be in overriding and removing features.
  For example, removing a menu choice is difficult
- The Vergil graph viewer should not necessarily expect to be a toplevel
  window.  The issue is: what happens when we look inside or when we
  plot data?  Right now, the position of the plots is encoded in the
  model.  This would be an issue in an Eclipse View, were the plots
  should be inside an Eclipse view.


About internationalization, we should stick with the standards, see
http://java.sun.com/javase/technologies/core/basic/intl/
and
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/i18n/index.html

The i18n tutorial suggests using ResourceBundles.