William E. Hart's Blog

A while back I developed EXACT , a Python package for executing computational experiments using an XML-defined process. EXACT was designed to fill a particular niche in software testing: performing computational tests that involve the application of solvers to a suite of test problems. This sort of testing arises a lot when doing functionality testing for scientific software. Unfortunately, EXACT was too complex: The XML specification was complex and difficult to read Experiments with many factors were assigned generic experiment IDs It was hard to replication the execution of specific experiments The experimental results were captured in XML results files that were difficult to browse Even my close collaborators struggled to setup, run and analyze computational experiments! {sigh} I have recently developed the pyutilib.autotest Python package to provide a simpler alternative to EXACT. This package uses a YAML test configuration file to specify the solvers and problems that are ...

The PyUtilib Component Architecture (PCA) is a component architecture in Python that is derived from the Trac component framework . One important extension was to support both singleton and non-singleton plugins. Trac plugins are singletons that are created immediately when the plugin module is loaded (Python is a wonderful language for supporting this type of capability). Singleton plugins are well-suited for Trac, since it is a persistent application, but many other applications need to employ plugins "on demand". Consequently, the PCA supports non-singleton plugins, which need to be explicitly constructed by the end-user. The PCA is widely used in the Coopr project, and most plugins are non-singletons. Until recently, the PCA did not directly support plugin construction on demand. That is, the user needed to know the plugin class name, and plugin construction was done explicitly by the user. However, most plugins in Coopr can be best described as named services . ...

This is just a heads-up that I have setup blogs for the Coopr and PyUtilib software projects: Coopr: https://software.sandia.gov/trac/coopr/blog PyUtilib: https://software.sandia.gov/trac/pyutilib/blog These blogs will document releases and end-user advice and examples. Additionally, there will hopefully be other authors than just me adding content to these blogs. But, I guess we'll see.