>>>>> "Abraham" == Abraham Schneider <ab...@cn...> writes: Abraham> Hi. I've found myself in the position of (a) often having Abraham> to plot data with specific views for either debugging or Abraham> publication purposes. While this is often easy enough to Abraham> write as a python script, I've found myself either Abraham> rewritting the same code over again, or having to create Abraham> a large number of command line parameters to specify Abraham> exactly what type of plot is required. It occured to me Abraham> that it might be nice to have a seperation of data and Abraham> plotting (i.e. MVC) and that XML would work well for Abraham> these purposes (e.g. libglade and renaissance) . For Abraham> example, something like: My initial response to something like this, which I've seen before in the context of mpl, is: what is the advantage of using a XML over python? Except for the plot command, which specifies a read data and filename, everything is pretty much a literal translation of python. My suggestion would be to create custom python classes that build your figures, and use python class PlotItem: def __init__(self, fn, fname, var, color, lw): ... do something with it class SubplotItem: def __init__(self, title, pos) ....contains one or more plot items class FigureItem: def __init__(self, title) ... contains one or more axes items fig = FigureItem(title="Hodgkin and Huxley cell") sub = SubplotItem(title="voltage" pos="1,1") fig.add_subplot(sub) plot = PlotItem(fn="readData" file="sim.dat", var="voltage") sub.add_plot(fig) and so on. Then you have the full power of python to specify your configuration layer. What does an XML layer buy you? I could see it's usefulness if you were trying to develop a GUI tool to edit and configure your figures.... There has been some interest in having a way to save a figure state to an external file and open it where you left off. An XML representation might be useful there, in that it would ease the development of figure editors in a way that a pickled version would not. Abraham> p.s. I've had the traits-based config library almost done Abraham> for a bit .. I just haven't had time to put the last Abraham> finishing touches on it. I'll email it soon. Great.