Uncle Unc

A new taskbar component has been added to the Sirius GUI, to show background activity by methods invoked in separate threads. Top bars are now collapsible, allowing better use of screen 'real-estate'. Some minor fixes have been made to the system dynamics model GUI to make it work again with the new Groupable model of View management between components.

The Sirius GUI method invocation mechanism is now multithreaded, allowing much larger tasks and datasets to be handled gracefully. Interaction between filtering and paging was improved, and has been successfully tested against apache log files containing 6-7000 entries.

Python startup scripts have now been implemented, allowing arbitrary objects to be added to the scrapbook folder on startup. Wrapping of live objects as Unc views has been extended considerably, allowing direct bindings to fields, methods and bean-style published fields as properties and methods of the current item, as an alternative to presenting them as child items. These features have been used to port a simulation model to use Unc as its GUI harness, which is included in the source distribution.

The GUI client can now handle methods with complex object arguments, by integrating a popup dialog box that searches for matching objects in the 'scrapbook' folder.

The database module has been revised considerably
to bring it up to speed with the paging
functionality. A view of data may now be divided
into pages, either by using the iteration pattern
applied to log files or by creating per-page SQL
statements where the underlying SQL statement
generating the resultset is known. This allows for
use with very large datasets. Along the way, a few
fixes to the paging GUI component have been made.
The sirius GUI client's ability to handle complex
method types has been expanded.