In our work for NCI, I had the distinct “pleasure” of being the UI guy for the project, a role I find myself in more often these days. Despite the vagaries and headaches that come with writing Java UI’s, I got the easy part of the deal. I got to write Swing code while Mike and Evren did some amazing, but difficult work on Pellet. And while I’m thinking of it, they should be applauded, they did a fantastic job on Pellet. Anyway, the catch was the UI had to come in the form of Protégé tab plug-in. In the past I’ve done my best to not use Protégé, but I was interested in finally using and dissecting a tool that many people use on a regular basis, including the folks at NCI.
Without going into extreme gory details of the work, I have a few thoughts on the ordeal. I was dismayed by the lack of documentation on how to write your own Protégé plug-ins and how to work with the Protégé core in general. There was a short blurb on their site, and some javadocs, but not much else. Fortunately, coding from javadocs is not a foriegn concept, so I was able to piece together what needed to happen. And the source is publicly available which was really invaluable. I unfortunately recieved no support from the mailing list. I guess perhaps it’s geared more toward users than developers. So much of the first few days of work were spent fumbling in the dark. But I eventually pushed through it and got things working.
I was surprised by how many default widgets were supplied with Protégé. Once I got up to speed and figured out how to get a tab installed, I was actually able to drop in a class tree and some list boxes populated from the tree without a whole lot of trouble. However, the widgets did not seem designed for developers to be able to customize easily. I could not find a trivially easy way to make the class tree just a plain tree. I did not want any of the editing functions normally associated with the class trees in other tabs. Same for the list boxes. I just needed them to show a list of elements and respond to selection events, I did not need any of the editing features. Also frustrating was some of what I would consider key functionalities where not present, or no-ops in the default implementation, such as the clearSelection function on the list boxes. Again, more time spent customizing stuff. Later in the process, once I had a working draft, I did try some of the widgets from the OWL plugin, which I had a little more success with, but not much.
All in all, the experience was less painful than I expected it to be. The code definately came together quicker that I originally thought. But if I was going to do it again, I’d definately consider coding bits of it from scratch rather than using widgets from the core codebase. I struggled at times for too long trying to overcome some of the over-engineered bits of Protégé. All of this work has made me interested in the Protégé 4 effort at Manchester. I have yet to play with their beta, but I’ve heard some good things about it already, and I look forward to mucking about in their code and fiddling with the tool.
Until next time, stay classy cyberspace.
