@@ -22,7 +22,7 @@ PAMHyR is available for two solvers, with two different types of studies: Mage a
2.2 Technical choices
From a technical point of view, choices were made on the basis of the above-mentioned objectives (modernity, maintainability, multiplatform, multilingual, user-friendliness, flexibility), as well as: the ease of learning the technology to facilitate contribution to the software, the popularity of the technology in the scientific community and the interoperability of this technology.
We chose Python8 as our programming language, it is a popular language in the scientific world, but also in many other fields, with lot of very active software libraries to facilitate development. What's more, it's a simple and interpreted language, often recommended for beginners, and practiced by beginners and experienced developers. In addition, there is the PyQT9 software library that lets you use the Qt10 GUI library, which is ideal for this project. It is very popular and active, and available on many platforms (GNU/Linux, Windows, MacOS, Unix, BSD, Android, iOS). Qt also includes a number of tools for translating interfaces into different languages. For graphics, the choice fell on MatPlotLib11, which is very popular in the scientific community and can be used to draw a wide variety of graphics. For saving studies, the choice was made to use SQLite12, unlike the previous version which used a text file formatted in XML. The advantages of a SQLite database, in addition to being supplied with Python, include ease of use, interoperability, formal structuring by table and consistency checking between tables. We have chosen to version the database to allow it to evolve with the software, now it is possible to add columns to tables or make other minor modifications to the database without breaking the compatibility of studies from previous versions. However, PAMHyR and Pamhyr2 study files are incompatible, and old studies have to be recreated for this version.
We chose Python8 as our programming language, it is a popular language in the scientific world, but also in many other fields, with lot of very active software libraries to facilitate development. What's more, it's a simple and interpreted language, often recommended for beginners, and practiced by beginners and experienced developers. In addition, there is the PyQT9 software library that lets you use the Qt10 GUI library, which is ideal for this project. It is very popular and active, and available on many platforms (GNU/Linux, Windows, MacOS, Unix, BSD, Android, iOS). Qt also includes a number of tools for translating interfaces into different languages. For graphics, the choice fell on MatPlotLib11, which is very popular in the scientific community and can be used to draw a wide variety of graphics. For saving studies, the choice was made to use SQLite12, unlike the previous version which used a text file formatted in XML. The advantages of a SQLite database, in addition to being supplied with Python, include ease of use, interoperability, fast, formal structuring by table and consistency checking between tables. We have chosen to version the database to allow it to evolve with the software, now it is possible to add columns to tables or make other minor modifications to the database without breaking the compatibility of studies from previous versions. However, PAMHyR and Pamhyr2 study files are incompatible, and old studies have to be recreated for this version.
This new version of PAMHyR remains closely linked to the Mage solver with which it is supplied. But the ambition of flexibility and generalization gives us the opportunity to develop an interface that can be adapted to other solvers. There can be two solutions for using a solver with Pamhyr2: either the solver adapt to Pamhyr2, or Pamhyr2 adapt to the solver. So Pamhyr2 must integrate a generic output containing the study data that can be used by other solvers, which will be launched via an external executable, and then a generic result input that must be supplied by the solver. In addition, Pamhyr2 must be able to handle the execution and reading of results for specific solvers, and the addition of a solver to PAMHYR must be reasonably easy for the solver developer. We have opted for a free (as in freedom/liberty) and open source software (FOSS) [5] license the GPLv313, which guarantees freedom to access, study, modify, redistribute and share. In addition, it guarantees that Pamhyr2's code will remain free and will not be able to add any closed-source modifications. However, it will still be possible to use closed-source solvers, because solver is not a part of Pamhyr2.
3. DEVELOPMENTS
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@@ -113,7 +113,7 @@ Functionalities that may or may not have been present in the old PAMHYR, enablin
The application packages are currently available for GNU/Linux and Windows, under GNU/Linux a “.tar.xz” archive is available for download. It contains a “pamhyr” executable and all the software libraries needed to run it. It also contains a version of Mage compatible with this version of Pamhyr2. For Windows, this is an installer for application and a compatible version of Mage. Once installed, you can launch PAMHYR without any further action on your part. An installer for GNU/Linux systems is a work in progress. There are many choices for creating an installer, but their scope depends on the distribution for which they are intended. “.deb”, for example, is intended for Debian distributions and their derivatives (Ubuntu, Linux Mint, ...). But there are other, more generic options.
5. Conclusion
After a great deal of preparatory work and several months of development, Pamhyr2 is currently in version “v0.0.0”15 and contains almost 20,000 lines of Python code. It allows to create a minimal 1D hydraulics study, run a Mage simulation and visualize some of the results obtained, all with a more user-friendly interface. But the software is still unstable and under development, with critical bugs and many modifications and improvements still to be made before it can really be used by everyone. What's more, even though many of the features of the original version of PAMHYR are already available (see 3.1 page 3), there are still many to be added.
After a great deal of preparatory work, experimentations, technical selection, proof-of-concept and several months of development, Currently, Pamhyr2 is in version “v0.0.0”15 and contains almost 20,000 lines of Python code. It allows to create a minimal 1D hydro-sedimentary study, run a Mage simulation and visualize some of the results obtained, all with a more user-friendly interface. But the software is still unstable and under development, and many modifications and improvements are still to be made before it can really be used by everyone. What's more, even though many of the features of the original version of PAMHYR are already available (see 3.1 page 3), there are still many to be added to make Pamhyr2 a complete, useful and fully functional piece of software.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
TODO citer PITI
The authors thank Sylvain Coulibaly for his preparatory work and his technical choices.
