Community Bonding - Week 1
I’m excited to be working with JdeRobot community on the VisualCircuit project!. Google Summer of Code starts off with a community bonding period where we get familiar with the community and also explore the project to get a better understanding.
We had a discussion at the beginning of the week about how to go about the project and the first steps to do.
Tasks
- Setup a blogging website to write about the progress of GSOC project.
- Get more familiar with VisualCircuit by implementing the Lane Detection example.
This repository will be used for all the code developed as well as the blog website. The blog website is written using jekyll based on the template ‘minimal-mistakes’
To explore what could be used for the drawing nodes on front-end. I considered 2 libraries react-diagrams and beautiful-react-diagrams. After implementing a basic diagram editor in both, what I have noticed is:
React Diagrams:
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| 1. It has a good separation of concern and well separated API for handling model data and the drawing. | 1. It is more verbose. Needs more code to handle a block (because data model, factory as well widget needs to be written separately |
| 2. It has extra features like Zoom, Locks (to prevent changes) and Serialisation/Deserialisation | 2. Does not have complete documentation |
| 3. It has multiple example projects |
Beautiful React Diagrams:
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| 1. Its simple, since it only needs a schema object to render. | 1. It has many features missing (out-of-the box) |
| 2. It has a slightly better documentation than React Diagrams | 2. The drawing of node seems to be bound to the state change that needs to be propagated from any component that changes underlying data schema. This makes handling multiple levels of models complicated. |
Conclusions
I think the React Diagrams is a better option since it has more features and separate API for data model and drawing engine.