This talk will share a bit of a personal journey with the Python programming
language. Over the last 15 years I have been increasingly using Python for a
variety of tasks from teaching, doing computational science, research, and
building applications. I will talk briefly about why Python has been such a
useful toolkit for me in all of these areas. I will then talk about Mayavi as
a particular example of a 3D visualization package written in Python.
Mayavi is an open source visualization toolkit/library that is implemented in
Python. The project has been active since 2001 and has been widely used.
Mayavi makes it very easy to perform typical visualization of 3D data and
makes it possible to perform more complex visualization. This is done using
the extremely capable VTK library under the hood.
One very important feature of Mayavi is that it has always been well
integrated with the Python programming language and its scientific computing
stack. This has resulted in a large adoption in the Python for scientific
computing community. It has also been used in commercial products as it is
easy to extend and embed in Python-based graphical applications.
We will discuss some important lessons learned during the development and use
of Mayavi.
