Spring Cleaning 09

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Over time, in spite of our best intentions, unreasonable, unmaintainable code creeps into the guts of any software. Due to the constant development process, just issues are noticed but are never addressed since no one has the time and they keep on propagating till more and more components start relying on the shady code. Spring cleaning is a mechanism to pause briefly and revisit and cleanup such issues. Everyone's encouraged to add to this list for 2009 cleaning.

  • Combing vtkSMVectorProperty subclasses by using templates -- one of the maintainability nightmares , although it has stabilized over time, we just have to avoid code duplication, no good can ever come out of it.
  • Checked/Unchecked property values. It's silly that the domains have to first look if the unchecked values are present, if so, use them else go to the normal values. There definitely some cleanup here making unchecked values a bit more automatic and cleaner to use.
  • Groups in the Server Manager XML files -- way too many arbitrary groups especially in rendering.xml and utilities.xml. We should consolidate them, come up with some convention. Don't forget to update the backwards compatibility layer to ensure that old state files still work.
  • Animation proxies -- this is part of code that has never been retouched since it was first implemented. I did this when I was still very new to Server Manager and hence there are many parts to it which are totally lame and un-servermanager-esque. Also, using these is hard -- try writing a python script for animation and you'll see how much fun that is :). With growing importance of python, it's time to clean this up as well.