SiHippo Documentation

1.13.3

HippoDraw canvas window

HippoDraw provides a highly interactive data analysis environment. It is written in C++ with the Qt library from Trolltech. It should run anywhere Qt runs which is just about everywhere. This release has been tested on Red Hat Linux 7.2, 7.3, 8.0 and 9, all current versions of Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X both native and with X Windows.

HippoDraw has highly interactive controls on the data plots via a dialog window called the Inspector. For example, one can change the width of the bins of a histogram via a slider and see the histogram plot re-display itself many times a second. See Inspector Controls for a description of the available controls.

A data source for HippoDraw is typically a NTuple. A number of visual Plot types can be made with this data. They are typically placed in Canvas Window.

Doing easy data analysis tasks should be easy and they are with with HippoDraw's Inspector. Doing more difficult tasks should be possible. Here, one would expect to find a command line and/or scripting interface to HippoDraw. But HippoDraw does not have either. Instead one of HippoDraw's Python extension modules is used. The Interactive Python Extension Module allows user manipulation of the data representations as if they were Python objects. This can be done either interactively, or via scripts written in Python. Changes made via Python are reflected in the Inspector and vice versa.

One can use HippoDraw's C++ library for Building custom applications in either C++ or Python. It consists of over 100 classes with about 50K lines of source code. However, the compiled code for the core library is relatively small being less than 2 MB without debugger symbols and a little over 10 MB with them. The HippoDraw Qt based GUI library is less than 1MB without debugging symbols and about 5MB with them. Both can compiled and linked in a total of 25 minutes with gcc 3.4.3 on a 850 Mhz Pentium 3 mobile machine. A descriptive of the library begins with HippoDraw Library Overview. A mirror of the CVS archive is browserable on the Web at this here.

Source code is available from ftp://ftp.slac.stanford.edu/users/pfkeb/hippodraw/. For Microsoft Windows users, a pre-built binary is available as a Microsoft installer file at the ftp site mentioned above. See Installation for installation instructions for Windows and Unix like systems. See HippoDraw Release Notes for changes, new features and bug fixes.

Author:

Paul F. Kunz <Paul_Kunz@slac.stanford.edu>

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