Comments on: Plotting in Python: matplotlib vs. PyQwt

By: eliben

eliben — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 16:10:17 +0000

@Drazick, I have no idea. Why would you want to do that? I’m really curious.

By: Drazick

Drazick — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 09:24:25 +0000

Is there a way to use Matplotlib within Matlab?

By: hasan

hasan — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 01:14:52 +0000

I am trying to animate a 2D fluid dynamics simulation which shows the voricity as a contour plot, and the velocity as a vector plot.

PyQwt seems to have a very good contour support, whereas matplotlib supports animating vector plots (using blit), but does not do so for contour plots.

I am split between which one to use.

By: eliben

eliben — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 03:03:01 +0000

@Fredrik, PyQwt comes with a few examples installed - a couple display dynamic plotting. Doing dynamic plotting in matplotlib is possible indeed, but since PyQwt is faster and lighter, it should be much easier to rise to higher frame-rates with it.

By: Fredrik

Fredrik — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 13:30:42 +0000

Which of the above mentioned libraries is “best” for real-time display?
ie updating the graph with new logging points. I have tried this with matplotlib but I found it hard to do, it felt like the model for matplotlib is to draw the graph once…

By: Gael Varoquaux

Gael Varoquaux — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 19:55:57 +0000

Oh, I realize that I haven’t fully answered your question about the compiled eggs. Yes, the are open source. Enthought is trying to promote the ETS (to see wider use of it), and publishes the ETS binary eggs under open source licenses.

By: Gael Varoquaux

Gael Varoquaux — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 19:54:19 +0000

Chaco, and the complete ETS, is BSD licensed. Enthought, and the various non-Enthought developers that contribute to ETS (including me), really believe in free software and in the BSD license. ETS is a set of open source tools that you can use as building blocks to build an application. EPD is a product built on top of these tools and many others.

By: eliben

eliben — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 06:47:35 +0000

@BC,

I’ve downloaded the Chaco .egg and tried to install it and it began to pull a whole lot of stuff from ETS, so it indeed requires a lot of dependencies. It also isn’t clear what the license status of these dependencies are, since they’re precompiled eggs for Windows. Does it count as ETS or EPD?

By: BC

BC — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 06:38:14 +0000

Chaco does not require the whole of ETS. It requires Traits (Traits was born out of Chaco development). You can easy_install Chaco from PyPI and (hopefully) it will only pull the bits it needs.

Chaco (and indeed the whole of ETS) IS free for commercial use. You are confusing ETS (the enthought tool suite) with EPD (the Enthought Python Distribution). EPD is not free for commercial use, but every component included in it is BSD-style licensed, so if you compile it yourself you can do what you like with it. On linux, building ETS poses no problems. On windows, paying for EPD is the easiest way to get ETS, if you don’t want to install a compiler.

By: eliben

eliben — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 05:45:29 +0000

I’ve heard of Chaco, but it appears to require the whole Enthought suite to be installed. This isn’t always an option, especially given that Enthought isn’t free for commercial use.