[SciPy-user] pyqwt or matplotlib

[Zachary Pincus]

> I've been using matplotlib for some small programs and it's very nice,
> powerful and beautiful. I've already embedded some matplotlib plots
> inside a PyQt application. But I have the impression that pyqwt is
> faster than matplotlib. Is it true? Is there another library for
> plotting that would do the job?

Another option, depending on how much plumbing you're interested in,  
is to write a custom tool with OpenGL...

I've been using Pyglet for some rather-specialized data display needs  
(blit live video from a microscope + plot derived measures on top of  
the video, using the mouse to pan and zoom), and it's pretty nice.  
Basically, Pyglet is a (pretty simple) pure-python, ctypes-based,  
multiplatform interface to OpenGL, windowing, and mouse/keyboard IO.  
It's quite hackable, too -- I rigged up a very simple system to run  
pyglet windows in a background thread, so I could control the  
microscope from an interactive python interpreter, while still being  
able to programmatically interact with pyglet window objects. (Happy  
to share this code with anyone who desires. It's much cleaner, IMO,  
than the gyrations that ipython has to go through to support  
nonblocking QT, Tk, etc. windows. This is becase the pyglet mainloop  
is in python, and is easy to subclass and otherwise mess with.)

The downside is of course that OpenGL isn't a plotting library. The  
upside is that if you have a well-defined plotting task, and you want  
full aesthetic control and also high speed, you can get that with not  
too much work.

Just a thought,
Zach