

Article 22 of comp.lang.visual:
Path: mimsy!haven!rutgers!uwvax!umn-d-ub!nic.MR.NET!shamash!nis!ems!amdahl!uunet!peregrine!elroy!spl1!laidbak!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!cornell!batcomputer!itsgw!imagine!rpics!hiebeler
>From: hiebeler@rpics (Dave Hiebeler)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.visual
Subject: Re: CONMAN
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
Date: 22 Oct 88 20:39:48 GMT
References: <[email-masked]>
Sender: [email-masked]
Reply-To: [email-masked] (Dave Hiebeler)
Organization: RPI CS Dept.
Lines: 39

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] writes:
>Anyone out there heard on 'conman' ? It is a CONnection MANanger
>prototype done by Silicon Graphics for IRIS machines. This has not
>been ported to Suns, or X-window, but from what I've read in USENIX '86
>(Summer, p. 419), it's a good concept. For visual programming, it
>replacess the linear model of piping with multi-dimensional data-flow
>diagrams. A similar representation can be made using Petri nets, entity
>diagrams or state-machine paradigms. Anyone having feedback or comments
>may contact me at [email-masked], or better still, share
>your thoughts with this group !
>
>- Phil.

  I've certainly seen Conman -- an awful lot, in fact.  It's being worked
on here at RPI;  from the demos I've seen, it seems like an extremely
nice system.  Very easy to piece different modules together in simple
but powerful ways;  for example, to display a three-dimensional rendition
of some object, you bring up a lighting-model program, and rotational
program, a scaling one, a shading-model program, etc.  Then, via conman,
you take the output of the lighting model, send it to the shading-prog's
input, the output of the rotator and scalar, and send them through
various things -- what you get is a bunch of programs in their windows,
all connect by little "pipes" so to speak, which connect to form a
final image.  If you move a slider in the "rotation" program's window,
that data is passed on to the renderer, which changes the image
appropriately, etc.
 As I said, it seem extremely easy to use, yet quite powerful.  I'd like
to see it implemented on other machines (Suns, maybe, but they don't
have the graphics-speed of the Iris, so I dunno.)  It does seem that
conman could be sort of thought of as a dataflow model, in a sense.
 Disclaimer: I am not involved with the conman project, and have no
real technical knowledge of it -- I've simply had it demonstrated to
me.  I was impressed; it deserves more than just a quick look.
----

Dave Hiebeler      Internet: [email-masked]  (preferred address)
R.D. Box 225A                [email-masked]
Chatham, NY 12037    Bitnet: [email-masked]
  "xue zai xao"     "...I can't remember what I was going to say..."